PRESTOPUNDIT -- "must readings" says Nick Schutz

Russian Prime Minister defies Putin, defending markets and opposing the siloviki.

The Forbes China Rich List. The Guardian suggests that the corrupt Chinese system requires businessmen to engage in criminality if they hope to make such a list.

Scientists identify from whence the Iceman cometh.

The invasion of the digital packrats:

Nearly 800 MB of recorded information is produced per person each year, or the equivalent of 30 feet of books, according to the report. Print, film, magnetic, and optical storage media produced about 5 exabytes of new information in 2002, with 92 percent of the new information stored on magnetic media, mostly in hard disks.

To fully comprehend the size of 5 exabytes, the report explains, "If digitized, the 19 million books and other print collections in the Library of Congress would contain about 10 terabytes of information; 5 exabytes of information is equivalent in size to the information contained in half a million new libraries the size of the Library of Congress print collections."

Another powerful example of 5 exabytes is that it is the equivalent of all the words ever spoken by human beings ..

The PrestoPundit digital archive is down below there just to the right.

Chief Wiggles, American Hero. (via the blogfather)

A letter from professor Walter Block:

Dear Colleagues:

Below see a letter I am putting together for my senior students who are thinking of going to graduate school to get a phd. All of them are interested in going to a university where the professors are sympathetic to free enterprise.

I list several options for them. There are no doubt several errors both of commission and omission in this list. Could you please correct these mistakes, so that I can give my students the most accurate information possible? ...

The letter:

Dear Students:

Here are my recommendations re grad schools.

I have three separate lists. In A, you can get a phd in economics, and Austrian economics is part of the official program.

In B, you can not get a phd in economics, and Austrian economics is not part of the official program, but there are Austrian economists on the faculty.

In C you can get a phd in economics, and Austrian economics is not part of the official program (but there are libertarians on the faculty).

A1. George Mason.
There are quite a few Austrian economics on the faculty: Don Boudreaux, Karen Vaughn (who is retiring soon), Richard Wagner, Jack High, Tyler Cowen, Alex Tabbarok. In addition, James Buchanan has some Austrian leanings, but only on subjective costs, and Bryan Caplan and Gordon Tullock are knowledgeable about Austrianism, albeit critical. Plus there are an additional, dozen or so libertarian but non Austrian profs, several in the law school; for example, Walter Williams, James Bennett, Ron Heiner, Charles Rowley, Vernon Smith, John Hasnas, Michael Krauss. Buchanan and Smith are Nobel Prize winners in economics. Contact: "Peter Boettke" pboettke@gmu.edu .

A2. New York University.
Mario Rizzo and Steven Harper are Austrian economists. NYU features an informal weekly Austrian seminar attended by several New York City area Austro libertarians, including Joe Salerno, ... Contact: mario.rizzo@nyu.edu

A3. Florida State, Tallahassee.
Bruce Benson and Randy Holcombe have interests in Austrianism; James Gwartney, is a free enterpriser. Contacts: "Prof. James D. Gwartney" jdgwart@aol.com , jgwartne@garnet.acns.fsu.edu
"Bruce Benson" bbenson@garnet.acns.fsu.edu holcombe@garnet.acns.fsu.edu

B1. Auburn University.
There is no phd in economics. The agricultural school has a phd program in agricultural economics. It is flexible so students can write dissertations with people from the economics department. You can also get a "resource"
economics phd from the forestry department which is similarly flexible. Most students take most of their core courses in the economics department. Professors sympathetic to free enterprise include John Jackson in economics,
David Laband (formerly of econ. department) now in forestry, Henry Thompson (formerly of econ. department) now in agriculture. Mark Thornton (an Austro libertarian) serves on a few dissertation committees. Contact: "Prof. Roger
W. Garrison" rgarrisn@business.auburn.edu

B2. University of Nevada at Law Vegas.
There is available a phd in Political Science and Sociology. Hans Hoppe can be member of either of these dissertation committees. Contact:
hoppeh@nevada.edu

B3. University of Missouri at Columbia.
Offers a phd in agricultural economics. Peter Klein is a libertarian Austrian. Contact: Peter Klein pklein@missouri.edu

B4. Guelph University.
Glenn Fox is an Austro libertarian. Only the phd in agricultural economics is available. However, Canada is even more socialistic than the U.S., hard as that is to believe. Contact: Glenn C. Fox Gfox@agec.uoguelph.ca

C1. University of Chicago. There are lots of free enterprise but non Austrian professors here. Almost all Nobel Prizes awarded to free enterprise oriented economists have had some contact with Chicago.

C2. University of Georgia, Athens.
George Selgin is highly knowledgeable about Austrian economics. Dwight Lee is a libertarian. I think there are two or three other libertarian non Austrian profs there. Contact: "Prof. Dwight R. Lee" DLEE@cbacc.cba.uga.edu
; "selgin@terry.uga.edu" selgin@terry.uga.edu
.

C3. Washington University, St. Louis
Murray Weidenbaum is a free market oriented professor, and Douglass North is a Nobel Laureate in Economics with a free market orientation. To the best of my knowledge, Wash U has more libertarian students than at any other school, virtually none of whom are econ majors. Contact: Art Carden, carden@wueconc.wustl.edu a graduate
student in economics.

Dr. Walter Block
Harold E. Wirth Eminent Scholar Endowed Chair in Economics
College of Business Administration
Loyola University New Orleans
6363 St. Charles Ave., Box 15
New Orleans, LA 70118
www.cba.loyno.edu/faculty/block/index.html
Office location: Miller Hall 321
work: (504)864-7934
secy: (504)864-7944
fax: (504)864-7970
wblock@loyno.edu

A bit of remedial economics for Larry Kudlow and Paul Krugman:

Larry Kudlow has greeted this little bit of statistical news with great enthusiasm. He sees a 'barnburner recovery' in this data. This, he thinks, is a true recovery. What is the source of this recovery? Capital expenditures rose 11%, up from 8% from the last quarter. A combination of tax cuts and expansionary monetary policy from the fed spurred an investment boom. As Kudlow writes, with the Fed accommodating investment with "15% growth in the basic money supply" and lower taxes increasing profitability investment will spend more on capital goods. Consumer confidence will improve also, but it is investment that drives the economy.

Kudlow has a dismissive tone towards demand side Keynesians, but his reasoning is not all that different. Kudlow views public policy as a means to stimulate the economy by stimulating investment spending. He does mention incentives hear and there, but he also fails to realize that it is consumer demand for final goods and services that are ultimately ‘driving the economy’. Economic efficiency does not derive from increasing investment spending and GDP. It derives from aligning the plans of consumers and entrepreneurs. This point warrants great attention. To see its importance, we should look at how a true Keynesian reacted to the announcement of higher growth.

Paul Krugman reacted cautiously to the latest news on GDP. This is somewhat odd, because the Bush Administration has been running huge deficits- exactly what Keynes prescribed for recessions. However, President Bush belongs to the wrong political party, so Krugman must invent some kind of problem pertaining to recent events.

Krugman reports that there was a significant pick up in investment spending. More importantly, consumer spending picked up as well. Consumer durables rose at an incredible 27% rate. Housing sales grew at 20% as well. What prompted this? "Consumers took advantage of low interest rates led to accelerate purchases that they would have made latter".

Krugman correctly recognizes that this cannot go on forever. Consumer expenditures cannot exceed consumer income, so consumer demand must fall. This boom may be temporary.

Paul Krugman has a unique talent for stumbling near the truth. It is quite true that low interest rates raise investment. Both consumer and investor spending cannot grow simultaneously for long. With increasing demand unemployment will fall. However, a general increase in spending- prompted by the fed expanding the money supply and decreasing interest rates- will increase prices in general. In other words, it will lead to inflation. This inflation will, as past episodes of inflation have, lead to another economic contraction and financial crash.

Krugman's penchant for bashing the Bush administration has led him close to the correct interpretation of the statistics in question. The current surge in demand cannot last indefinitely. There is, however, an important lesson that neither he nor Kudlow have yet learned. Economists Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek developed an explanation of how inflationary booms lead to busts. When central banks drive interest rates down, as the Fed recently has, business investors will invest in projects that they previously saw as unprofitable when the financial cost of repaying loans falls. They will think longer term. Consumers will act upon low interest rates to increase their consumption. Lower interest rates decrease the returns to deferred consumption (savings money is really just deferred consumption). They will think short term. With households revising their expectations in one direction and businesses revising their expectations in the other direction, we will witness increasing discoordination in the economy.

The problem we face is not in stimulating the supply side or the demand side. The problem we face is in coordinating the plans of all individuals on the demand and supply sides of markets with each other simultaneously. Prices in competitive markets bring us close to this coordination. Order emerges in society as an unintended consequence of private competition. Deliberate efforts to stimulate, or otherwise manipulate, the economy causes discoordination. Inflationary boom bust cycles are an example of this.

Things are not always as they initially appear. Strong surges in GDP growth appear to be a treat for all of us. Larry Kudlow and Paul Krugman appear to many as expert interpreters of economic data. Despite these appearances, inflationary monetary policies and deficit spending are tricks that lead to economic discoordination, and these experts have much to learn about economics.

7.2% GDP growth? Karen DeCoster is not impressed:

It seems everyone is going gaga over the latest GDP figures. I'm not. I'm still seeing the same household debt-to-income ratios, an all-time high of bankruptcies, the same housing bubbles, the same paper asset bubbles, the same unemployment rates, and the same growth in the money supply. It seems that few are willing to say that this GDP growth (read: consumer spending) is financed by debt, but this is how it goes in this easy-credit time we are in: if you have a pulse, you can get a loan.

William Kristol et al on the imperial Supreme Court. Quotable:

Today’s judiciary really is “imperial” and, to a remarkable degree, extra-constitutional. The courts have done serious damage to the American political and social order. They therefore pose a major political problem. But this is a problem that defenders of the constitutional and political order—call us conservatives—have so far failed to deal with successfully.

The failure goes back at least three decades. By the mid-1970’s, the “imperial judiciary” was already understood to be a problem, not just on the far reaches of the political Right, or among the constitutionally fastidious, but in (more or less) mainstream circles like this journal. The federal courts were in the process of imposing a disastrous educational and social policy of forced busing all around the country, based on a claim of an amazingly broad power to make up for alleged past wrongs. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court had in 1972 outlawed the death penalty as it was then administered, and in 1973 had struck down the abortion laws of all 50 states—both startlingly extra-constitutional actions.

But this moment of opportunity to curb the courts was lost ...

A new Bear Flag Review.

Jeff Tucker:

The Economist offers an interesting commentary on the GDP boom: "While America’s corporations have been strengthening their balance sheets, the same cannot be said for households. According to Thursday’s figures, consumer spending rose at an annual rate of 6.6% in the last quarter. Pre-tax incomes, however, grew by much less. Part of the difference was filled by borrowing, which was growing at an annualised rate of over 5% in the summer months. Borrowing at such a rate seems unsustainable but, for the moment, households seem happy to add to their debts because they are easier than ever to service. Interest rates recall the fifties not the nineties. On Tuesday, the Federal Reserve voted to keep its target interest rate at its lowest level since 1958 for a 'considerable period'. Rates on mortgages, personal loans and car loans are at the lowest that most borrowers can remember.... Borrowing from the future is made even easier when the government does it for you. The federal government ran an unprecedented deficit of $374 billion in the fiscal year just ended—and this record is unlikely to stand for long."

Optimism might also be tempered by the money supply data offered by Frank Shostak: 8% increases through the summer months can create an impressive boomlet.

U.S. economic growth rate -- 7.2 percent -- and the inflation rate quadruples. Here's the U.S. gov's official press release.

And Paul Krugman reverts to anti-Keynesian economic logic 101:

First, while there was a significant pickup in business investment, the bulk of last quarter's growth came from a huge surge in consumer spending, with a further boost from housing. These components of spending stayed strong even when the economy was weak, so there shouldn't have been any pent-up demand. Yet housing grew at a 20 percent rate, while spending on consumer durables (that's stuff like cars and TV sets) — which last year grew three times as fast as the economy — rose at an incredible 27 percent rate last quarter.

This can't go on — in the long run, consumer spending can't outpace the growth in consumer income. Stephen Roach of Morgan Stanley has suggested, plausibly, that much of last quarter's consumer splurge was "borrowed" from the future: consumers took advantage of low-interest financing, cash from home refinancing and tax rebate checks to accelerate purchases they would otherwise have made later. If he's right, we'll see below-normal purchases and slower growth in the months ahead.

This is what Friedrich Hayek or Roger Garrison would call burning the candle at both ends -- it's a classic unsustainable Keynesian funny-money boom generated by a false system of prices imposed on the market by the government, with false interest rates coming from the Federal Reserve and false tax rates coming from the Federal government. The market is being pushed further from sustainable coordination through time by these false prices. The market has been fighting to re-coordinate after the Federal Reserve screwup of the last seven or eight years. Rather than helping the process, the false prices of the Fed Res and the Fed Gov have only delayed things, and have assured that the yo-yo of economic fluctuations will continue to gyrate rather severely. Buckle up for another bumpy Fed sponsored rollercoaster ride.

Tom Smith from The Right Coast on moral philosophy and moral philosophers:

I have found it amusing over the years to observe, for example, that many moral philosophers seem to have trouble living very morally. My philosophy advisor, a truly wonderful man and teacher, Norman Kretzman, who died some years ago, once remarked at a meeting in which one of his (now pretty well known) philandering colleagues was assigned to teach the course "Contemporary Moral Problems" that "it takes one to know one."

I've noted the same phenomena. I've actually seen a "moral" philosopher steal wood from an unsuspecting neighbor. He was actually stealing it, sneaking around so he wouldn't get caught. Weird.

Arlen Specter sounded like an idiot at the Justice Brown hearings because he was an idiot. Some things never change.

What it was like 10 years ago in the Laguna fire.

Colin McGinn -- the making of a philosopher.

Some folks in California need to read this book, before the next season of fires. It wouldn't hurt if some folks in Washington, D.C. read a chapter or two as well. The book is written by this man.

Here is what he's about:

A monster fire in Arizona [July 2002] is devouring trees and houses with unprecedented ferocity. It has already consumed 450,000 acres of forest and forced 30,000 people to evacuate their homes. This is just one of 17 big fires scorching the West. So far, they have burned nearly twice as many acres as were consumed at this point in the record fire year of 2000. Since 1990, wildfires charred over 40 million acres, destroyed more than 4000 homes, and cost $5 billion to fight. These tragic losses are growing worse each year because of a misguided belief of many environmentalists that all fires are good and management is bad.

On the contrary, most of today's fires are bad and management is the only way to stop them. Fires now look like battlefields when they burn. When a fire finally stops, it leaves a desolate landscape scared by erosion and pitted with craters that formed where tree roots burned. The blackened corpses of animals and fallen trees litter the ground and standing dead trees form a ghostly skeleton of the former forest. This is not natural.

Historically, fire was part of America's forests, but not the monster fires of today. Hot fires burned only a few types of forest, and then only infrequently. Most forests burned often and gently. The flames were low in a gentle fire, creeping through grass and pine needles, leaving most large trees unharmed, and only briefly flaring up in scattered log piles, brush, or thickets. These fires kept historic forests open, patchy, diverse, and safe from monster fires.

What went so terribly wrong? Everyone knows the simple answer, too much fuel. More than a century ago, we began protecting forests from fire. We did not know that lightning fires kept them thin. More recently, we adopted an anti-management philosophy that protects forests from people. This ignores 12,000 years of history in which Native Americans doubled the number of fires by using them as a tool to keep forests open and productive.

Now logs and branches clutter the ground and trees grow so thick that it is difficult to walk through many forests. It is not surprising that the gentle fires of the past have become the destructive monsters of the present.

Fuel is part of the problem, but there is more to the story of what went wrong. Unlike the image of historic forests promoted by anti-management advocates, which depicts old trees spread like a blanket over the landscape, a historic forest was patchy. It looked more like a quilt than a blanket. Each patch consisted of a group of trees of about the same age, some young patches, some old patches, or meadows depending on how many years passed since fire created a new opening where they could grow.

The variety of patches in historic forests helped to contain hot fires. Most patches of young trees, and old trees with little underneath did not burn well and served as firebreaks. Still, chance led to fires skipping some patches. So, fuel built up and the next fire burned a few of them while doing little harm to the rest of the forest. Thus, most historic forests developed an ingenious pattern of little firebreaks that kept them immune from monster fires.

Today, the patchiness of our forests is gone, so they have lost their immunity to monster fires. Fires now spread across vast areas because we let all patches grow thick, and there are few younger and open patches left to slow the flames. That is what is happening throughout the West.

This is even more serious because monster fires create even bigger monsters. Huge blocks of seedlings that grow on burned areas become older and thicker at the same time. When it burns again, fire spreads farther and creates an even bigger block of fuel for the next fire. This cycle of monster fires has begun. Today, the average fire is nearly double the size it was in the last two decades and it may double again.

What should we do? We can thin little trees and use prescribed burns to reduce fuels, but that is not enough. We must use history as a guide and restore the natural immunity of our forests to monster fires. That means cutting whatever trees are necessary, big or small, to recreate the patchiness and diversity of historic forests that kept fires gentle and helpful.

It is easy to do. Foresters have the knowledge to restore our forests. They can do it using logging, thinning, and prescribed burning. Management has the added advantage of creating jobs, producing forest products, and generating revenue to cover the cost. If we act now we can stop the monster fires while also creating forests that rival the beauty and sustainability of historic forests.

The debate over "Healthy Forests" will be a good test to see if the environmental lobby can overcome its more extreme members and embrace common-sense reforms.

-- from John Fund's Political Diary.

Hoover seminar on Hayek-L -- Dec. 8 - Dec. 19

Ken Hoover will conduct an e-seminar between Monday, Dec. 8 to Friday, Dec. 19 on his book Economics as Ideology; Keynes, Laski, Hayek, and the Creation of Contemporary Politics on the Hayek-L email list.

Order the book from Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0742531139/ref=nosim/thefriedrhayeksc/

Table of Contents:

Preface: Left, Center, and Right in the 20th Century
Of Identities, Ideas, and Ideologies
The Pre-War World: Seeds of Struggle
World War I: Unresolved Conflicts
The Twenties: Government and the Market in Combat
The Thirties: Duel of Allegiances
World War II: Destruction and Deliverance
The Post-War World: Denouement
The Second Half-Century: From Ideas to Ideologies
Developmental Turning Points and the Formation of Ideology
The Oppositional Bind of Ideology
Identity, Ideology, and Politics

From the publisher:

"Economics as Ideology: Keynes, Laski, Hayek and the Creation of Contemporary Politics explores the lives and thought of three powerful theorists who shaped the foundations of the center, left, and right of the political spectrum in the 20th century. Noted scholar Kenneth R. Hoover examines how each thinker developed their ideas, looks at why and how their views evolved into ideologies, and draws connections between these ideologies and our contemporary political situation.

Similar in age, colleagues in academic life, and participants in the century's
defining political events, the story of Keynes, Laski, and Hayek is also the
story of how we in the west came to define politics as the choice between
government and the market, between regulation and freedom, and between the
classes and the masses."

About Ken Hoover:

Kenneth R. Hoover is professor of political science at Western Washington
University. His previous books include The Elements of Social Scientific Thinking, Ideology and Political Life, and The Power of Identity: Politics in a New Key. "

Ken Hoover's email address is: Ken.Hoover@wwu.edu

His web page is at: http://www.ac.wwu.edu/~khoover/

Advanced reviews:

"An important book and a fascinating, absorbing read."—G. C. Harcourt, Jesus
College, Cambridge University

"The idea is simply splendid. It does make supreme sense to construct a history
of theories of political economy in the 20th century around Keynes, Laski, and
Hayek and the three do, in fact, succeed one another in 'hegemony' as the
century unfolds. Inasmuch as Keynes and Hayek were interlocutors and rivals and duelists their relationship bears considerable drama and the fact that Hayek
appears to have had the last laugh makes for high irony. It is a major
achievement of this volume that Hoover never loses sight of the intellectual
stakes in these debates." — James Scott, Yale University

"Economics as Ideology is a most engrossing book. It tells an important tale of
the development of economic thinking through the stories of three giants of
political economic thought. Lives intersected at the nexus of theory and
practice told in a compelling, even dramatic, narrative makes for better reading
than a novel. I kept wanting to know how it was going to turn out--even though I
knew the general contours from the start. The book offers important background
for understanding economic thinking as it has evolved. It will be greatly
prized." — Sanford F. Schram, author of Praxis for the Poor: Piven and Cloward
and the Future of Social Science in Social Welfare

"I enormously enjoyed reading Economics as Ideology. The tradition of parallel
and interacting biography is small but distinguished. Hoover adds a further
dimension with his examination of the role of opposition, and his investigation
of the link between social situation, individual circumstances, and thinking." —
Rodney Barker, London School of Economics

"This is a very credible work of prodigious scholarship, with frequent keen
analyses and insights, and written in a lively, attractive style." — Kenneth
Dolbeare, editor of American Political Thought

Related papers:

"IDEOLOGIZING INSTITUTIONS: Laski, Hayek, Keynes, and the Creation of Contemporary Politics" by Kenneth Hoover, Journal of Political Ideologies, February, 1999, 4 (1), 87-115. On the web at:

To SUBSCRIBE to Hayek-L, send the message:

SUBSCRIBE Hayek-L

to: LISTSERV@MAELSTROM.STJOHNS.EDU

For example, your message might read: SUBSCRIBE Hayek-L Jane Citizen

The Hayek-L archives are at:

http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/archives/hayek-l.html

Information on the Hayek-L email list can be found at:

http://www.hayekcenter.org/hayek-l/hayek-l.html

Greg Ransom
Hayek-L list host

Justice Janice Brown: "Out of the Mainstream"... by Ann Coulter:

The newspaper that almost missed the war in Iraq because its reporters were in Georgia covering the membership policies of the Augusta National Golf Club has declared another one of President George Bush's judicial nominees as "out of the mainstream." The New York Times has proclaimed so many Bush nominees "out of the mainstream" that the editorial calling California Supreme Court Justice Janice Rogers Brown "out of the mainstream" was literally titled: "Out of the Mainstream, Again." Among Bush's "many unworthy judicial nominees," the Times said, Brown is "among the very worst" – more "out of the mainstream" than all the rest! Even Teddy Kennedy, who might be well advised to withhold comment on a woman's position relative to a moving body of water, has described Brown as "out of the mainstream," adding, "Let's just hope this one can swim."

Liberals are hysterical about Justice Brown principally because she is black. Nothing enrages them so much as a minority who does not spend her days saying hosannas to liberals.

On the basis of its editorial positions, the Times seems to have called a bunch of racist Southern election supervisors out of retirement to cover judicial nominations for the paper. The only difference is, instead of phony "literacy" tests, now we have phony "mainstream" tests. Amazingly, no matter how many conservative minorities Bush sends up, the Times has not been able to find a single one who is "qualified." The Times thinks Justice Brown should be the maid and Miguel Estrada the pool boy.

According to the Times, Brown has "declared war on the mainstream legal values that most Americans hold dear." What the Times means by "mainstream legal values" is: off-the-charts unpopular positions favored by NAMBLA, the ACLU and The New York Times editorial page.

Thus, for example, opposition to partial-birth abortion – opposed by 70 percent of the American people – is "out of the mainstream."

Support for the death penalty – supported by 70 percent of the American people – is "out of the mainstream."

Opposition to government-sanctioned race discrimination – which voters in the largest state in the nation put on an initiative titled Proposition 209 and enacted into law – is "out of the mainstream."

Opposition to gay marriage – opposed by 60 percent of the American people – is "out of the mainstream."

Failing to recognize that totally nude dancing is "speech" is "out of the mainstream."

Questioning whether gay Scoutmasters should be taking 14-year-old boys on overnight sleepovers in the woods is "out of the mainstream."

I guess if your "mainstream" includes Roman Polanski, Michael Moore, Howard Dean and Jacques Chirac, then Brown really is "out of the mainstream." This proverbial "stream" they're constantly referring to is evidently located somewhere in France.

Liberals are always complaining that they haven't figured out how to distill their message to slogans and bumper stickers – as they allege Republicans have. Though it can't be easy to fit the entire Communist Manifesto on a bumper sticker, I beg to differ. (Bumper sticker version of the current Democratic platform: "Ask me about how I'm going to raise your taxes.")

The problem is, if Democrats ever dared speak coherently, the American people would lynch them. Fortunately for liberals, soccer moms hear that a nominee is "extreme" and "out the mainstream" and are too frightened to ask for details. (Ironically, based on ticket sales and TV ratings, soccer is also out of the mainstream.)

In addition to the fact that she is black and "out of the mainstream," the first item in the Times' bill of particulars against Brown was this:

"She regularly stakes out extreme positions, often dissenting alone. In one case, her court ordered a rental car company to stop its supervisor from calling Hispanic employees by racial epithets. Justice Brown dissented, arguing that doing so violated the company's free-speech rights."

Despite the Times' implication that Brown was "dissenting alone" in this case, she was not. The opinion of the California Supreme Court in the case, Aguilar v. Avis, was as closely divided as it gets: 4-3. Among the dissenters was Stanley Mosk, who was once described by the Los Angeles Times as "the court's most liberal member." When Mosk died in 2001, his obituary in The New York Times described him as "the only liberal on the seven-member court." I suppose if the Times had mentioned that a prominent liberal jurist had agreed with Brown in Aguilar, it would be harder to frighten silly women with that "out of the mainstream" babble.

But the real beauty part of Brown's dissent in Aguilar is that she was vindicating a constitutional principle that is second in importance only to abortion for liberals: no prior restraints on speech.

In a major victory for Avis, the jury rejected almost all of the claims against Avis by Hispanic employees, but did find that two managers – only one of whom still worked at Avis – had called Hispanics names. So the lower-court judge got the idea to issue an injunction prohibiting one single Avis manager from ever using derogatory language about Avis' Hispanic employees.

The injunction was broad enough to prevent the manager from using such language in his home, out of earshot of his employees, in a joking or friendly manner, as part of a hypothetical example, or even if his speech were incapable of creating a "hostile environment" under the law. Questions were also raised about whether he was even allowed to chuckle at the little dog in those "Yo quiero Taco Bell" TV commercials. It was basically a bill of attainder against this one manager (who was himself married to a Hispanic).

I note that liberals laughed at the idea that a "hostile environment" could be created by a single incident of a governor dropping his pants and asking a subordinate to "kiss it." But the mere speculative threat of a manager saying "wetback" – one time – was such a threat to the stability of the nation that the Times backed a prior restraint on the manager's speech.

Usually The New York Times is citing the law's antagonism to prior restraints on speech in order to wax eloquent about the Supreme Court's "landmark decision in the Pentagon Papers case." In a ruling that celebrated the very essence of the First Amendment, the court ruled that the government couldn't stop the Treason Times from publishing classified national-security documents. As the Times put it, that case had "made it clear that only a showing of concrete, immediate risk to the nation could justify a judicial order imposing a prior restraint on any kind of publication."

But apparently, there is one interest even more vital than preventing an immediate risk to the nation: stopping a supervisor someplace in America from ever using the word "spic." Anyone who disagrees is "out of the mainstream." And any minority who is not duly grateful to liberals for supporting prior restraints against certain words is only qualified to be the maid.

9,000 recall-related LA Times cancellations and counting.

Anti-Capitalist Anti-Semites by Mark Struass. Quotable:

modern anti-Semitism made its debut with the emergence of global capitalism in the 19th century. When Jews left their urban ghettos and a small but visible number emerged as successful bankers, financiers, and entrepreneurs, they engendered resentment among those who envied their unfathomable success, especially given Jews’ secondary status in society.

Some left-wing economists, such as French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, depicted Jews as the driving force behind global capitalism. Other socialist thinkers saw their theories corrupted by the racism of the era. In 1887, German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies published his classic work, Community and Society, wherein he blamed capitalism for undermining society’s communitarian impulses and creating a merchant class that was “unscrupulous, egoistic and self-willed, treating all human beings as his nearest friends as only means to his ends.” A few years later, German social scientist Werner Sombart took Tönnies’s theories to their next step and meticulously explained how Jews “influenced the outward form of modern capitalism” and “gave expression to its inward spirit.” Sombart’s book, The Jews and Economic Life, would influence an entire generation of German anti-Semitic authors ..

David Frum: "Murray [challenges] his readers and listeners to name even one artistic or scientific achievement (he thinks science – pure science, that is, as opposed to technological or engineering progress - is declining for different reasons) of the past 50 years that will still matter to people in the year 2200."

PrestoPundit's 10 things from 1950 to 2000 that will still matter two hundred years hence:

1. Discovery of DNA.

2. Disney's Winnie the Pooh.

3. Ludwig Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations.

5. Gerald Edelman's clonal selection theory of the immune system -- and later developments.

5. The Sound of Music.

6. Discovery of REM sleep and related sleep science developments.

7. The movies of Hitchcock.

8. Confirmation of the Big Bang theory.

9. American & British popular music, 1955-1975.

10. Discovery that impotence has a biological not psychological cause.

Put string theory near the top of the list, if the theory holds up in another 200 years.

The Fed -- why we kept the Fed Funds rate at 1%.

UC Riverside economist declares "stimulative effect" due to fire destroyed housing in Southern California could "be a lift to the economy". But will enough houses be destroyed to assure a Bush re-election? Hmm. Does any economist want to put this bit of "predictive science" into a mathematical equation, thus giving it the economist's official seal of approval as real "science"? (Via Jeff Tucker, who identifies this as the classic economic fallacy exposed most famously by Bastiat and popularized among "scientists" by the crank JM Keynes).

Alan Greenspan's professional competency rating is lowered to junk bond status by central banking rating service.

Charles Murray's Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences discussed in the NY Times.

Here's PBS's "The Elegant Universe" web site with lots of great stuff on string theory, including a section from Brian Greene's original book.

Americans could increase their standard of living by 20 percent if the government simply collected today's aggregate tax revenue from a flat-rate tax system -- Bruce Bartlett reports new empirical research on work, taxation and income.

Justice Scalia thinks that Justice Kennedy's constitutional jurisprudence is a joke. And he's right.

Bill Whalen pumps more buzz into the Sen. Dennis Miller trial balloon.

Hayek, Stiglitz, and Michael Powell by Arnold Kling. Kling argues that FCC Chairman Michael Powell is Hayekian, while most regulators are Stiglitzian. Quotable:

Hayek would have the government tolerate messy competition. His point is that with the optimal outcome unknown, government resolution of issues shuts off the learning process that market competition provides.

Stiglitz sees the messiness in real-world economies, and he claims to have the right solution in every case. ..Stiglitz's outlook is that markets are imperfect, but he is not. Where Marx offered dictatorship of the proletariat, Stiglitz would give us dictatorship of the Nobel Laureate. Between the two, we might be safer with Marx.

Kling's interactive blog discussion of the matter can be found here.

"If the triumph of the New Right could be blamed on one person, that villain might be Austrian economist F.A. Hayek .. " -- In These Times takes on our hero and draws some lessons for leftists.

The (neuro) science of tastes, preference and choice. It turns out that high brain cognitions can decisively shape lower brain tastes. Quotable:

In the series of TV commercials from the 70's and 80's that pitted Coke against Pepsi in a blind taste test, Pepsi was usually the winner. So why, Montague asked himself not long ago, did Coke appeal so strongly to so many people if it didn't taste any better?

Over several months this past summer, Montague set to work looking for a scientifically convincing answer. He assembled a group of test subjects and, while monitoring their brain activity with an M.R.I. machine, recreated the Pepsi Challenge. His results confirmed those of the TV campaign: Pepsi tended to produce a stronger response than Coke in the brain's ventral putamen, a region thought to process feelings of reward. (Monkeys, for instance, exhibit activity in the ventral putamen when they receive food for completing a task.) Indeed, in people who preferred Pepsi, the ventral putamen was five times as active when drinking Pepsi than that of Coke fans when drinking Coke.

In the real world, of course, taste is not everything. So Montague tried to gauge the appeal of Coke's image, its ''brand influence,'' by repeating the experiment with a small variation: this time, he announced which of the sample tastes were Coke. The outcome was remarkable: almost all the subjects said they preferred Coke. What's more, the brain activity of the subjects was now different. There was also activity in the medial prefrontal cortex, an area of the brain that scientists say governs high-level cognitive powers. Apparently, the subjects were meditating in a more sophisticated way on the taste of Coke, allowing memories and other impressions of the drink -- in a word, its brand -- to shape their preference.

Pepsi, crucially, couldn't achieve the same effect. When Montague reversed the situation, announcing which tastes were of Pepsi, far fewer of the subjects said they preferred Pepsi. Montague was impressed: he had demonstrated, with a fair degree of neuroscientific precision, the special power of Coke's brand to override our taste buds.

Earthworms -- non-indigenous invaders destructive to native American ecosystems. Who would have thunk?

NASA's gigantic closeup of the Southern California fires 10/27/03.

Bruce Bartlett -- look out for the Bush tax increases.

Thomas Sowell explains what Diane Feinstein and her Democrat friends in the Senate are all about:

Janice Rogers Brown is being seen, not just as a threat to the liberal agenda in the courts, but also as a threat to political orthodoxy among blacks, a key voting bloc for the Democrats. For her to go from her current position on the California Supreme Court to national prominence would threaten the monopoly of the liberal-left mindset among blacks.

Black "leaders" like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, and black organizations like the NAACP, must maintain a monopoly because they cannot risk everything in a free market of ideas. Therefore they must demonize Clarence Thomas and cut off at the pass anyone who might become another nationally visible black voice with alternative ideas.

The whole Democratic Party has a huge vested interest in a solid black vote today that is like the "solid South" which Democrats relied on in national elections back in the days of Jim Crow. As a Republican, Justice Brown is a threat to that monolithic solidarity, even if she never says a word about politics.

Democrats -- black and white alike -- realize that she must be stopped right here and right now, before she can gain national prominence as a federal appeals judge, who might well end up on the U.S. Supreme Court in future years. Janice Rogers Brown and Clarence Thomas both on the same Supreme Court is a liberals' nightmare.

None of this has anything to do with the merits of a judicial nominee ..

Enough said.

And view the updated animation.

Carnival Of The Capitalists #3.

Patterico reports from the new Disney Hall in Los Angeles. What did he think? We'll, lets just say he'll be back.

Internationally isolated, fighting economic decline .. yes, we're talking about France. Quotable:

Nicolas Baverez, a historian and economist, has led this fall's doom-and-gloom pack of books and essays. His manifesto: a 135-page bestseller titled "France Is Falling." His thesis: The country's economy, politics and society have sunk into paralysis because leaders have consistently and self-destructively resisted change and refused to accept the realities of a modernizing, globalizing world.

Baverez blames an antiquated, statist mentality for unemployment mired at near 10%, economic growth near zero, crippling strikes, the deaths of almost 15,000 people during an August heat wave that overwhelmed a health system on vacation, and other maladies both tangible and existential.

In contrast to the United States, Baverez writes, French leaders believe "the more things change, the more must be done to change nothing.... This political, economic and social immobility, which is also intellectual and moral, has plunged France into decline.

"The autism of a political class moored to the models of the 1960s and 1970s has ... [degraded] the nation." ..

Although Baverez is no fan of U.S. foreign policy, he dismisses Chirac's approach as a futile attempt to make France a kind of high-minded referee of international affairs. Throwing around "words of power without means of power," he said, masks France's fading role in a divided Europe and in a world shaped by the military and economic might of the United States.

"France finds itself in complete isolation in the world and in Europe," Baverez writes.

David Bernstein fisks the NY Times Justice Brown editorial.

Roger Ailes of Fox News takes the NY Times and the LA Times to journalism school.

"Public Choice" theory -- Nobel winner James Buchanan explains it all for you -- historical development, philosophical foundation, explanatory siginificance. Quotable:

The essential wisdom of the 18th century, of Adam Smith and classical political economy and of the American Founders, was lost through two centuries of intellectual folly. Public choice does little more than incorporate a rediscovery of this wisdom and its implications into economic analyses of modern politics.

Academic "Star Wars" with its "me, myself and I" entrepreneurship vs. the development of a community of teachers and scholars "engage with colleagues of differing views of expertise". Don't bet on community or cross-disciplinary conversation.

"Live Free or Die" -- voting with their feet -- New Hampshire and the Free State Project.

Wages continue to inch upwards. Median hourly wages edge toward $14 an hour -- and average hours worked dips below 34 hours per week.

This is interesting. I've always believed that moral spankings lead often to improved moral behavior and character. And -- not so long after a good public moral spanking -- we find William J. Bennett now sharing his byline with his co-authors. As I say, interesting.

The national tax revolt rolls on -- slamming this time east into Ohio.

California Supreme Court Justice Janice Brown before the U.S. Senate monkey court Judiciary Committee on C-SPAN (video feed). Could Arlen Specter be any more of a baffoon? He sounds like the equivalent of a feeble minded man prentending to understand and argue about the specifics of unified field theory. And could Ted Kennedy be any more dishonest, cynical and vicious?

Garrett Hardin, ecologist and author of "The Tragedy of the Commons", is dead at age 88. Hardin and Hayek corresponded a bit, and where interested in each others work.

Terrorists have a sizable advantage. A terrorist can attack at any time, in any place, using virtually any technique. And it is not possible to defend every potential target at all times in every place against every form of attack. That being the case, the way to defeat terrorists is to take the war to them -- to go after them where they live and plan and hide, and to make clear to states that sponsor and harbor them that such actions will have consequences.

-- America's War Defense Secretary explains America's defense war strategy, today in the Washington Post.

John Fund on Schwarzenegger in Sacramento.

Brian Greene explains string theory beginning Tuesday on PBS.

Santorini volcanic explosion of 1645 B.C. -- now considered far worse than Krakatoa, almost certainly the most powerful volcanic explosion in the last 10,000 years. Bye bye Atlantis -- and bye bye Minoan civilization.

Ashes, ashes, we all fall down. Southern California today.

A look at the jurisprudence of Justice Brown.

The New Left Times squats and does a Kennedy on Justice Brown.

Gary Becker challenges Milton Friedman to endorse competitive currencies, Tyler Cowen reports from the Friedman conference in Dallas. I'm pretty sure Friedman has endorsed competitive currencies, as reported some months ago on this blog. Let me check that out ..

How free trade was good for Mexico's official refrigerator monopoly.

Speaking truth to honorary lifeguard Ted Kennedy -- Justice Brown goes before the (corrupt) U.S. Senate.

Diane Feinstein -- a continued embarrassment for California -- attacked Justice Brown with these silly and deeply cynical words "How can I depend on you to disassociate yourself from those views and follow the law?" These words for a sitting State Supreme Court justice with an outstanding legal record.

Feinstein was doing the McCarthite/Kennedy treatment on Brown for her exercise of her free speech rights in a talk for students which included the following statement, "where government moves in, community retreats, civil society disintegrates, and our ability to control our destiny atrophies. The result is: families under siege, war in the streets, unapologetic expropriation of property, the precipitous decline of the rule of law, the rapid rise of corruption, the loss of civility and the triumph of deceit."

Our experience in the last 100 years -- if facts matter -- is the all too sad truth of this statement.

.. and action!. Quotable: "I think the Legislature needs to understand that this is a governor who has the unique ability to go over our heads and talk directly to the voters" -- State Senator Jim Brulte.

British lefty philosopher Ted Honderich justifies terrorism in the name of humanity -- and aimed at the West. Is he an anti-semite also?

Adam Smith vs. Bill Gates, Sr..

Congressional legislation calls for the end to discrimination on America's college campuses.

U.S. Congressmen introduce legislation to endagainst those who aren't leftist or Democrats on America's college campuses.

Can former Enron adviser Paul Krugman get any nuttier?

School kids don't know much about Lewis & Clark.

My neice was stunned to learn at age 12 that there were still "Native American" Indians still alive today. She was not at first easily convinced by her grandmother that this was in fact the truth. She was sure that she had learned in school that all of them had been killed by white people.

Ironically, my neice wouldn't be here today if her great great grandmother hadn't hid in a field to escape an Indian massacre of settlers in Oregon country.

My unfortunate neice for two years was taught by a hippy-dippy teacher of the 60s generation -- who used "whole language" and failed to teach my neice to read. It wasn't until 4th grade that my neice began to read her first sentences. A disgrace. (Postcript -- she's now doing fine in school, according to the lowered standards of the day).

NPR's Ombudsman Jeffrey Dvorkin on NPR -- yes NPR was unfair to Bill O'Reilly, yes NPR happily "carries the water" for leftwing kooks, and yes, NPR is a biased leftwing outfit.

The only surprise here is that someone at NPR is brave enough -- and honest enough -- to speak the truth about the elephant pooping in the livingroom (on the taxpayer's dime).

Freeman Dyson reviews Einstein's Clocks, Poincaré's Maps: Empires of Time by Peter Galison.

Thomas Sowell comes to the defense of Justice Janice Rogers Brown of the California Supreme Court.

And here is Part II of Sowell's defense of Justice Brown.

Le Monde on Ludwig Mises and the Mises Institute.

The Guardian's 100 greatest novels of all time. Let's see. 3, 4, 16, 20, 21, 22, 24, 31, 38, 48, 49, 52, 53, 59, 63, 66, 73, all read cover to cover. That's 16 out of 100. Of course, I've read bits and pieces of many of the others, and may have even completed some of those -- but who can remember? My thought has always been that too much of this was read at way too young an age. A 16 year old shouldn't be spending his time reading Moby Dick -- he should be out living life, as Herman Melville was before he began writing his novels. Too few young men have the opportunity to do such a thing today. A shame and a tragedy, both for the young and for literature.

The list I would enjoy putting together is the list of the 100 greatest plays of all time. Somehow the play has always captured my imagination in a way the novel never has -- for example, I would much prefer to have written a great play than a great novel. I'm not sure why.

I don't read much fiction anymore (who has the time?) But I'd like to think that I'd be right to say that the Guardian list could do better by including more William Faulkner -- though perhaps the idea was simply to include only one title per author. I really do need at some point to go back and dip into some of the old stuff I've read ages ago, and take a look to see what I'm able to see now, with grown-up eyes and more education than you can shake a stick at. As a logic teacher I should no doubt begin with Alice's Adventures In Wonderland ...

Schwarzenegger and the California mystique. (via Roger Simon).

What's up with Schwarzenegger's face.

A blogosphere "Carnival of the Capitalists". Business / economics blogs sound off.

The latest Bear Flag Review.

Tammy Bruce -- defends her spot on the Schwarzenegger transition team.

The LA Times gives a scoop away to NBC News -- so that NBC can tee-up a U.S. general for the LA Times to kick. Hugh Hewitt has the story.

Hugh Hewett on the Internet vs. the LA Times.

What next? a Sacramento bureau for ET?

blogoSFERICS has a blogosphere highlights roundup. Take a lookie.

Jill Stewart takes on John Carroll and the LA Times:

How the Los Angeles Times Really Decided to Publish its Accounts of Women Who Said They Were Groped

(Oct 14, 2003)

~ By Jill Stewart
Now that the California gubernatorial recall election is over, one debate is still raging--the question of how much bias the Los Angeles Times allowed into its coverage and polls. I am offering three items below, not my normal "Capitol Punishment" column, exploring this issue.

The first item is my response to John Carroll, executive editor of the Los Angeles Times. On Sunday, Oct. 12, Carroll published a bylined justification for his decisions to run eleventh-hour bombshells that alleged Arnold Schwarzenegger had groped women. Carroll used his Opinion section to attack me, Los Angeles Weekly political commentator Bill Bradley, and other commentators who criticized the way the Times has handled itself--but Carroll did so without actually naming any of us.

The second item is an illuminating interview I conducted last week with a longtime, well-respected Timesian who was involved in the Schwarzenegger probe. This source contacted me after hearing me discuss the Times bias against Schwarzenegger, and its longtime protection of Davis, on a cable network. My description of Times bias, this inside source says, "is exactly how it's been, except it's been three times as bad."

The third item is commentary on this controversy which I sought from Dr. Paul Fick, author of the best selling "The Dysfunctional President: Inside the Mind of Bill Clinton." Fick is an expert on why powerful people behave the way they do. He comments on Schwarzenegger's possible mindset and the motives of Carroll and the Los Angeles Times.

Item One:
My Response to Times Executive Editor John Carroll

Carroll's attack on me was partly over my contention that the story could have been published two weeks beforehand, which I was told by employees at the Times who called me out of frustration over how the story was handled. Carroll denies this and says the story was published as soon as it was done.

However, my sources insist that Carroll made conscious decisions that delayed the story---decisions which a sophisticated journalist such as Carroll would realize could easily create publication delays that would make it too late for the Schwarzenegger camp to have time to credibly respond.

According to two of my sources, the huge team of reporters that Carroll eventually tapped to dig dirt on Schwarzenegger had plenty of examples to publish their story when they got a tip, late in the game, about a woman who was allegedly groped.

My sources say the woman repeatedly refused to talk to the Times. A lead reporter on the Arnold swat team was assigned to cajole and call the woman over many days. The story could easily have run without this anonymous tale, which resembled the stories of other women. But Carroll, obsessed with piling on more stories even as the clock ran out, pushed onward. The reporter repeatedly pressured the woman for her story. This woman finally relented in order to make the journalist stop harassing her, and her story was added to the pile.

Despite the obvious need to get the sex harassment story in the paper well before the election so that it would not act as a last-minute and unfair smear, another source says that Carroll then made a very conscious decision to hold back the article while a story about Schwarzenegger's steroid use was edited (see interview below). The steroids investigative piece was a disappointment to editors, this source says, because it did not portray Schwarzenegger in nearly the horrific light that they had hoped.

The editor handling both pieces, Joel Sappell, put aside his work on the sex harassment story to edit the steroids article. It ran on the Monday eight days before the election. Only when that piece was edited could Sappell turn his full attention to editing the sex harassment story, which ran the Thursday before the election. Carroll's decision to push the steroids story ahead of the groping story seriously delayed publishing of the bombshell, this source says.

Carroll claims that the groping story was published as soon as it was done. In fact, in journalism, a story is done when the boss says turn it in. Carroll himself saw to it that the story was strung out until the last. That is why some staffers continue to insist to me that the story was sufficiently nailed and should have run two weeks beforehand.

Carroll also takes issue with my claims that the paper has had chances over the years to dig up glaring dirt on Davis' violent fits and attacks upon his staff. I claim that the Times digs just so deep before backing off and abandoning these touchy stories.

First, Carroll made a phony claim on Sunday so he could knock it down, writing, "it was written that the paper failed to follow up on reports that Davis had mistreated women in his office." Hey, John Carroll, I wrote precisely the opposite. I clearly wrote, in a special column for the Daily News of Los Angeles, Long Beach Press-Telegram and Ventura County Reporter, that the Times did follow-up on the alleged mistreatment, and that I crossed paths with their reporters while I too investigated the story. But the Times never published any articles---while I did publish my findings about Davis' secret personality, in New Times Los Angeles in 1997 and 1998.

Here's the full, phony, Carroll paragraph: "It was written that the paper failed to follow up on reports that Davis had mistreated women in his office. Fact: Virginia Ellis, a recent Pulitzer Prize finalist, and other Times reporters investigated this twice. Their finding both times: The discernible facts didn't support a story."

Besides his gross inaccuracy, check out that last sentence about discernible facts. It is meaningless doubletalk. A California state bureaucrat might as well have written it.

Carroll was not employed by the Times back then. Maybe this is why he fails to mention the reason one of the reporters gave me, when I called in the late 1990s to find out why the story on Davis' bizarre dual personality never ran. The reporter told me Times editors dropped further pursuit of Davis' office violence because the Times editors were opposed to attacking major political figures using anonymous sources. Obviously, things have changed. At least for one side of the political aisle.

Moreover, Carroll focuses only on attacks by Davis reported in New Times Los Angeles in the late 1990s. Why didn't the Times do a Schwarzenegger-style probe of earlier Davis bad behavior and much more recent Davis bad behavior? For example: how about the widely rumored violent fit Davis threw on election night in November, 2002 at the Century Plaza Hotel, which got a lot of airtime in the Bay Area this year when a radio talk show in San Francisco went public with it?

As a guest on the Oct. 12 edition of CNN's "Reliable Sources with Howard Kurtz," I pointed out that the Times never published a word on that reported Davis meltdown. A Times editor based in Washington, D.C. insisted the Los Angeles office checked out the story---that Gray Davis destroyed a TV set---and found nothing. Naturally, they'll forgive me at the Times for doubting that they did a Schwarzenegger-level scouring. But maybe the discernible facts didn't support a story.

More on this is discussed in the interview, in Item Two, below.

In addition to Carroll's criticism of me, Carroll misreported what Bill Bradley's stunning story said last week in the LA Weekly. Bradley told me he has left messages for Carroll, pointing out the factual error Carroll made. Bradley deserves a published correction in the Times.

Bradley dropped a real bombshell last week when he reported in the Weekly that somebody at the Times, who was tied in closely to the paper's Arnold hit team, leaked key details of the Schwarzenegger groping piece to Democratic Party insiders before the Times published its story. (Bradley did not report that somebody at the Times kept the Democrats "apprised of the newspaper's probe, step by step," as Carroll erroneously wrote on Sunday.)

A leak about the story's contents from the Times to the Democrats might explain why Democratic operatives seemed able to mount an incredibly fast and coordinated attack on Schwarzenegger the moment the story appeared.

Leaking by a journalist to help a political campaign would be a firing offense at most newspapers. Yet Carroll appears to be utterly dismissive of Bradley's story. Bill Bradley and I both specialize in writing about the Sacramento power elite, but we have almost never seen eye-to-eye on politics or politicians. We do not socialize, and at times our relations have been poor. However, both of us can clearly see that something went wrong at the Los Angeles Times.

Item Two:
A View Inside the 'Get Arnold' Newsroom

The overriding issue is the out-the-gate bias with which the paper conducted its coverage. The Times ultimately created a huge---wait until you hear how huge---team dedicated to digging dirt, of any kind, from any decade, on rumored and reported personal behavior by Schwarzenegger. Yet while the newspaper poured massive resources into this effort, (is it too crazy to suggest a pricetag of $100,000?) it did not create a similar team, or even seriously discuss a team, to dig dirt on rumored and reported personal behavior by Davis. (See my Oct. 4 column at www.jillstewart.net.)

It's fine that John Carroll is pushing the Times local staff toward investigative reporting. However, Carroll's own behavior, as described below by someone who was there, and the manner in which the Times staff gleefully seized upon personal dirt about Schwarzenegger while avoiding personal dirt about Davis, does not instill confidence that the Times will use its investigative powers wisely.

Here is the inside story from a longtime, respected Timesian involved in the Schwarzenegger coverage. The following comments from this source are verbatim, except that I have added a few brackets for clarification and removed my own occasional interruptions:

"Toward the end, a kind of hysteria gripped the newsroom. I witnessed a deep-seated, irrational need to get something on this guy [Schwarzenegger]. By Wednesday before it was published, I counted not fewer than 24 reporters dispatched on Arnold, and this entire enterprise was directed by John Carroll himself."

"Carroll launched the project with the words: 'I want a full scrub of Arnold.' This was fully and completely and daily driven by Carroll. He's as good as his word on being balanced and trying to make this paper more balanced, he really is. But not when it came to Schwarzenegger. Carroll changed completely. It was visceral, and he made it clear he wanted something bad on Schwarzenegger and he didn't care what it was."

"The air of unreality among people here was so extreme that when they did the office pool, of something like 113 people who put in a dollar to bet on the outcome of the recall and on who would be chosen governor, only 31 bet 'yes' on recall and 'yes' Schwarzenegger to win. All you had to do was read a poll to know how wrong that was, but inside this place only about 25 percent of the people could see the recall coming."

"People inside here are far more detached from the new media reality. They are generally unaware that the Times is reviled by large numbers of Southern Californians."

"What I know for a fact is that they could have published the story much, much earlier. First of all, they had the Wendy Leigh story, the highly detailed story from a British writer, with highly detailed groping allegations, from which they got the Anna Richardson anecdote. She was named in the L.A. Times. They had enough stories from his past, very early on, to have the story in the bag many weeks before they did."

"Second, they fucked around with the Mark Arax story on steroids use by Schwarzenegger. Joel Sappell edited that, and it went on Page One, instead of trying to get the groping story in the paper fast. The steroids piece had been meant to be something much more than a portrait of his rough behavior in his bodybuilding days. It was a disappointment that much, much worse things about Schwarzenegger weren't found. They certainly tried. They should've finished up the big attack story on groping instead of slowing down to wrap up the steroids piece. It pushed the big attack story right into the final days of the campaign. It was incredibly, incredibly irresponsible for John Carroll to do that."

"It all happened amidst a poisonous atmosphere here against Schwarzenegger---a blatant political undertone that was everywhere in the newsroom. These are people who have been in the building a long time and have formed a culture together. It's easy for all of us to start thinking very much alike."

"The reporters probed everything they could think of about Schwarzenegger: his health, his businesses, his charities. They couldn't find out anything horrible about his charities, but they tried very, very hard. His business empire made him look good---so the business empire story was buried in the paper. It ended up on something like, I don't know, Page A36. And as these issues got abandoned because they produced no dirt on Arnold, as desired by Carroll, the team going after him got more and more focused on sex and steroids."

"It was awful to watch Carroll. It became a Capt. Ahab and Moby Dick thing where they felt an increasing need to nail those points that could most hurt Schwarzenegger. At times, it made me physically uncomfortable to be in the newsroom."

"There was a building roster of people assigned as this frenzy grew. By the week the story ran, a roster of more than 24 reporters had been fanned out over all aspects of Arnold in a flat-out effort to turn him upside down, and Carroll was openly visible in the newsroom in a way I have never seen before. That was really incredible to see. He was out of his office and in the newsroom, and this was his show, not Dean [Baquet's] show. And when reporters saw that he [Carroll] just needed to nail it and get whatever information toward that goal, it turned into a frenzy. People were running across the newsroom, people were racing out to knock on strangers' doors."

"The things that you have reported about Gray Davis attacking and throwing things at staff members are not the only things Gray Davis did that are well known within the Times. Not at all. There was more personal behavior to look into on Gray Davis that would have hurt his candidacy, if the Times had pursued it. They knew, and they didn't pursue it. As you said on FOX or CNN, Carroll very obviously did not create a team to dig into Davis' background. Mass hypnosis is the way it felt to me, when responsible people begin to suspend their responsible judgement like that. I don't really believe it was a conscious decision to help the Democrats over the Republicans. It didn't feel like partisan politics to me at all. I don't think it was that conscious. These are not bad people. An unthinking mass response, completely unthinking, is the only explanation I have."

"If you want to hang onto your job, you can't have an open discussion about this. If an editor really did make a speech at the A1 meeting [where stories are picked for the front page] that the Los Angeles Times was going to be hurt far more by this attack than Arnold Schwarzenegger, I really pray that is true, that somebody spoke out. I cannot confirm that. When they see Jill Stewart on a TV screen here, there is open, blatant antagonism. There is absolutely no self-examination going on at the Times."

"The mainstream press critics like those published on Romenesko are asleep as to what has happened here. They are defending the L.A. Times in every way. There should be no defense by media critics of what happened here. One woman did not sleep for two nights after a Times reporter showed up at her door, with the thinnest evidence, demanding to know if her child was Arnold's love child. It never panned out, it was untrue. Why has the L.A. Times become a tabloid, knocking relentlessly on people's doors for tabloid gossip? And would John Carroll have run a front page Love Child story if it had been true? Could we sink any lower?"

"At the end, the tabloidy bias leaked out all over the front page, even infecting the headline writers. You probably saw the story where Schwarzenegger announces his plans for his administration, and we headlined it something like, 'Actor Behaves As if He's Won.' That front page was pure tabloid."

"The paper used methods as if they were trying to crack a criminal enterprise. That is fundamentally what happened here. They took the rules of criminal investigation and overlaid them onto a political campaign, as if we had an organized crime figure running for office. One of the lead reporters is a good, seasoned Pulitzer journalist, who had not covered California, and it was his first week or so at the Times. He had taken a two-year hiatus in Alaska before arriving here. He really walked into this, and it's not his fault, and it's a shame. He got caught in an ugly dynamic that people above him created."

"I was deeply ashamed of the final days, after our first attack story ran. After that, we ran daily, unverified claims of groping against Schwarzenegger. Some people here insist that we couldn't run the first attack piece on Schwarzenegger any sooner than five days before the election because the groping claims took so long to verify. How were those groping claims of all those women at the end checked out in a few hours and pushed into the paper by next morning? What happened here, from day one, was deeply aberrant. Yes, our political coverage is skewed, like most papers, and so what? It's a fact of life. This was aberrant. It was outside of bounds. It was intense and real. To get something on him was the goal. No question, and no other goal."

Long, entertaining piece on press coverage of Schwarzenegger's last days on the campaign trail.

The NY Times reports on how talk radio and the internet allowed Republicans to get their media-fisking messages out unfiltered by the political sieve of the print press:

Republicans on talk radio, the Internet and some cable television talk shows accused the newspaper of shilling for Gov. Gray Davis. And many voters agreed. "This is a Davis ploy — he's the king of dirty tricks," one Schwarzenegger voter said, adding, "If anything, it made me want to vote for him more."

Mr. Schwarzenegger's election put more than incumbent politicians on notice. It also gave pause to the establishment news media, with implications that go beyond a single governor's race, political and media analysts said. Other candidates running as outsiders — like Howard Dean and Gen. Wesley K. Clark — are proving they can overcome potentially damaging coverage by positioning the news media as part of the establishment they are fighting.

They are being helped by two increasingly important factors. More outlets are available on radio, cable and the Web where partisan commentators can make their cases, unfiltered, to ever-larger audiences. And polls show that the public's perception of the mainstream news media is growing more negative.

"The media couldn't stop us because the people are becoming savvy to the media," said Jesse Ventura, the former wrestler who was governor of Minnesota from 1999 to this year, referring to Mr. Schwarzenegger and himself. "They're realizing the media's dishonest."

Mimicking the Schwarzenegger campaign's line that the Los Angeles Times articles about groping were a result of "puke politics" by the Davis campaign, Rush Limbaugh, the radio talk show host, told listeners on Election Day that the newspaper's journalists were "dastardly political assassins who use ink instead of bullets to hit candidates under the cover of objective journalism."

Another East Coast journalist gets the most basic recall facts laughably wrong:

Even when 45 percent of California's voters didn't pick a replacement candidate (because they voted "no" on the recall), Arnold Schwarzenegger's votes this time were 3.7 million from the remaining 55 percent, compared to Davis' 3.5 million from 100 percent of the electorate last year.

Can you believe it?

Berkeley Dean of Journalism: Most Bay Area residents are Lefties because they're not stupid like most folks in conservative areas -- and they don't live in those God forsaken places conservatives inhabit. Quotable:

"It strikes me that the better educated people are, more often than not, they tend to be more liberal, and I think this is a very well-educated area," said Orville Schell, noted author and dean of the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.

The intellectual attributes of the region are matched by its physical setting -- a place of such beauty and splendor that people come here and never leave.

"When you live in a beautiful place, which the whole Bay Area is, you draw people for whom that is important and the idea of preservation, moderation, of walking a little more softly, is important. And I think that creates a kind of liberal mind-set in an environmental sense and in a larger political sense," Schell said.

"There's really something here that is still worth protecting. You can't really say that about Los Angeles or many cities of America. They're finished.

These are the kind of folks who are training the reporters and editors at places like The LA Times. Get used to it.

I well remember journalism classes taken with a professor who ever four years served as a delegate to the Democrat Party National Convention. I learned not to raise my hand much.

Howard Owens has this great quote from Mark Halperin, political director for ABC News:

Let me tell you something that your viewers, I think, particularly should be a aware of as they follow the chance Arnold Schwarzenegger has to succeed. Most of the news your viewers, the news and information your viewers are going to get about Arnold Schwarzenegger the man and the emerging politician is going to come from media that's a little more radically left of center, that is dismissive of Arnold Schwarzenegger because he's a movie star, and because of his accent, that's dismissive of Arnold Schwarzenegger's intellect and of his capacity to be a broad governor in terms of his ability to reach a broad coalition.

And they're going to be infused by friends of theirs that they see at cocktail parties and dinner parties who are more dismissive of him and feel about him the way a lot of Democrats felt about Ronald Reagan and feel about George W. Bush -- completely alienated from him; culturally in some ways; intellectually in some ways ...

I think people who are looking at it through that filter may well miss a deeper intellect that your story may suggest and somebody with the capacity to achieve his goals than they are going to give him credit for.

Owens also has a Bear Flag call to arms.

Matt Welch on why Schwarzenegger needs the media.

California to the press -- take your bias and shove it:

Arnold Schwarzenegger won, and Gray Davis lost, as did Cruz Bustamante, as did Arianna Huffington. But no one was more rejected in this 61 percent Republican tidal wave in an overwhelming Democratic state than the liberal press. Consider the media recalled.

From the first signatures on recall petitions, the press was huffing and puffing with hysteria. Newsweek said the state "was in thrall to an earnest crank ... in the grip of what can only be described as a civic crackup." The New York Times called it a "throbbing political hangover." Peter Jennings warned, "The recall is on the verge of unleashing a political tempest. Some in California would say political madness."

When it was over, the press was still howling "Foul!" Remember how, after the GOP landslide in 1994, Jennings compared the public to 2-year-olds and complained "the voters had a temper tantrum last week"? There must be something in the drinking water at ABC. On the morning of the Schwarzenegger victory, there was his colleague Linda Douglass claiming (with no evidence provided) that "Schwarzenegger acknowledged that the recall campaign was the result of a statewide temper tantrum."

Of course, voters were upset, but national reporters didn’t dare tread near what might be causing this troublesome discontent: skyrocketing spending, tripled car taxes, slipping bond ratings, overpaid public-employee unions. Once the movie star entered the race, all the spotlights -- and all the nit-picking scrutiny -- were directed at him.

It didn’t matter that the people felt very obviously that Gov. Gray Davis was an incompetent in need of sudden retirement. It didn’t matter that the lieutenant governor who aspired to replace him had ties to a bizarre group believing several southwestern states should be sawed off America and handed back to the Mexicans. It didn’t matter than Gov. Davis tried to save himself by signing a bill to award illegal aliens state-sanctioned driver’s licenses, making it easier for homeland-security threats to move right into the mainstream of California -- and perhaps other states as well.

What mattered were mangled statements Arnold supposedly made in 1975 during the filming of his breakthrough documentary "Pumping Iron." What mattered were wild claims about group sex at the gym that Arnold made in the pornographic magazine Oui in 1977. What mattered was an anonymous female, "a former pro beach volleyball player," who claimed that Arnold touched her breast on a Santa Monica street in 1980. No longer were we being admonished by the press to "move on." Now, they were instructing the voters to back up.

The media labored hard against the recall. First, it was a "circus," a freak show for pornographers, porn actresses, disgruntled child stars and thong-underwear-selling self-promoters. Then, it was Arnold, obviously too stupid even to form complete sentences in a debate. Then, it was so unfair that a dedicated longtime public servant should be overturned by an actor with zero administrative experience, as if Davis’ experience ruining the state wasn’t the issue.

When these lines didn’t work, it was the media -- not just Democratic partisans but the media -- who reached into the ugly bag and started throwing unsubstantiated rumors and groping stories. The Los Angeles Times, which dismissed last-minute entreaties in 1992 to bring Juanita Broaddrick’s rape story to public scrutiny as "toxic waste," spent weeks goading women into telling anonymous tales about a comparatively meaningless boob squeeze in the 1970s. Tom Brokaw, who couldn’t bear to touch Broaddrick’s rape story with a 10-foot pole, even as it aired on his own network, dared to lecture Arnold that his behavior "could be criminal."

The media hypocrisy is so obvious as to be transparent.

Which brings us back to ABC reporter Linda Douglass, who mangled Arnold’s alleged 1975 praise of Adolf Hitler. In 1975, he told an interviewer that he admired Hitler’s "way of getting to the people" but then added, "But I don’t admire him for what he did with it." Douglass artfully changed the quote and reported that he had said, "I admire him for being such a good public speaker and for what he did with it," which gave license to Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe and Gray Davis to spend the final weekend pretending out loud that Arnold had swastikas tattooed on his biceps. When Arnold protested the story to Peter Jennings, the anchorman replied, "But you had to know that this was all going to come out in a campaign. It is, after all, your past -- it isn't made up, is it?" In fact, ABC was making stuff up.

It’s obvious that Schwarzenegger, with his libertine movie-star misbehavior and social positions, not to mention his utter lack of political finesse in his pre-candidate days, was not the ideal conservative role model. But in the end, California voters just told the media to take their bias and shove it.

The LA Times gets fisked again:

The press and political elite still don't get the message - or the value - of the recall.

These are tough times for political elites, who get mighty uncomfortable every time the hard-pressed, overtaxed, over-regulated, underappreciated taxpayer challenges their power.

The Los Angeles Times, which has been unyielding in its depiction of the recall as a giant hissy fit, and unprofessional in its last-minute airing of charges against the now-governor-elect, is facing not only the usual subscription cancellations but a loss of credibility because of its partisan and hectoring coverage of the race.

Even some conservative elites, such as columnist George Will (whose column is printed on Page 4 of today's Register Commentary section), are in high dither. Writes Will: "California's recall - a riot of millionaires masquerading as a 'revolt of the people' - began with a rich conservative Republican congressman, who could think of no other way he might become governor, financing the gathering of the necessary signatures."

That's not exactly true, given that the recall had long been under way, and was on schedule probably for the March ballot before Darrell Issa's dollars helped qualify it for October. But I do thank Will for reminding us that this was an imperfect revolt.

Perhaps we should have waited around for a perfect one.

Back to the Times. The day after Arnold Schwarzenegger won the race in a landslide, the Times - in all apparent seriousness - gave the man it tried so hard to destroy an outline for the future.

Of course if Der Gropenfuhrer, as one Times columnist graciously called him on Wednesday, puts the plan in place he will instantly become the source of another recall.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. In explaining "How the Engine Derailed," the Times editorial pins California's underlying fiscal dysfunction on several longstanding problems.

The recall has nothing to do with the outgoing governor's lack of leadership, or his commitment to showering special interests with special favors, or a left-leaning Democratic leadership that wants to tax and spend without any limits, or a souring business climate that has caused the state to hemorrhage manufacturing jobs.

It has nothing to do with the problem outlined by state Sen. Tom McClintock, who during his honorable but long-shot candidacy for governor, kept this key point on the table: "In the last four years, inflation and population have grown at a combined rate of 21 percent. Revenues coming into the state's coffers have increased 25 percent. ... We've had a 40 percent increase in state spending in the same period. And it is this rapacity and recklessness that turned a $12 billion surplus into a $35 billion operating deficit in a period of less than two years."

Nope, the problem isn't the spending. The problem is budgetary mechanisms make it too hard for the government to raise taxes every time it overspends its budget.

Problem No. 1, per the Times: term limits. They replaced professional legislators with novices. The pros, you see, were far better at raising taxes in a bipartisan manner, whereas their less-skilled replacements aren't as good at crafting tax-raising bipartisan budget deals.

Another key problem: The two-thirds vote rule. The newspaper calls it a "crippling restriction" that "allows for tyranny by a minority." Had it not been for the two-thirds vote requirement, however, Gov. Davis and the Democratic-dominated Legislature could simply have raised taxes by $38 billion to cover the budget gap. It would have been so easy. Actually, the rule is the ultimate protection by an unprotected majority (taxpayers) from a rapacious minority (state officials).

Next problem: Proposition 13. Never mind that mere mention of reforming it by Schwarzenegger adviser Warren Buffett almost cost the actor the election. This needs to be fixed. How dare the people put limits on property tax increases to protect themselves from being taxed out of their homes? Supporters of Prop. 13 aren't thinking about the hardships this imposes on bureaucrats who must now go to greater lengths to raise taxes, which we all know are too low (no matter how high they get).

To normal, hard-working, middle-class people, the problem is the political class and its zeal for showering influential groups with benefits, courtesy of the California taxpayer. It gets back to McClintock's point: The state has a spending problem, not a revenue problem.

To elites, the problem is that the public, which selfishly doesn't want to be taxed at confiscatory rates, keeps revolting. It keeps imposing by initiative what state leaders won't do: namely, place restrictions on taxation and remove the most craven politicians from power.

It's not just the restrictions on taxation that bother the elites, it's the nerve of the peons for sticking up for their money and freedoms. Columnist Will disses the two-thirds supermajority, but he mainly seems angered by the presumptuousness of the public.

How dare these spoiled brats engage in "direct democracy," something the founders frowned upon. I agree that representative democracy is generally a better approach, but what does a public do when liberty-hating zealots control every lever of power?

Should we just sit back and take it? Direct democracy isn't ideal. But it's better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.

Notice that attacks on the recall almost always drip with condescension. Will, writing from his home somewhere outside California, says "the people deserve to get what they demand. Don't they?"

To Peter King, in his Times column on Wednesday, the recall is the result of ungrateful Californians, who, instead of enjoying the sun and palm trees, are protesting "the car tax, which is used to finance firehouses, libraries and other local government endeavors," and "a new law that permits undocumented field hands, who make up the majority of the state's farm labor force, to obtain driver's licenses."

We're just a bunch of babies, you see. As long as the weather is nice, we ought to allow our earnings to be confiscated and our lives to be controlled by King's political allies. We're racists, too. All this anger, sparked I presume by the fascists on talk radio, is "aimed at the latest wave of new Californians," King intones. (Forget that nearly half of Latino voters voted yes on the recall.)

Now you understand. This recall had absolutely nothing to do with fiscal mismanagement, or a hostile regulatory climate that limits individual freedoms and punishes businesses, or a governor and Legislature completely controlled by some of the most aggressive special interests (unions, trial lawyers, Indian casinos), who claim to represent the "little guy" but seem mainly to fill their own pockets with cash.

Anger at the tripled car tax has nothing to do with people, already pinched by tough economic times, who don't want to spend hundreds of dollars more a year to pay for governments that neglect basic responsibilities yet shower their public-employee union workers with outrageously generous benefits. The license issue isn't about the rule of law or about pandering to ethnic groups. It's about racism and childish behavior. And rich guys wanting to be governor.

Fortunately, the governor-elect got a good taste right before the election of what the elite media are after (his hide) and should take their advice with as much seriousness as it deserves.

David Broder exposed:

For two months, much of the national media has lazily characterized the recall push as a tawdry Republican power grab instead of another revolt by Californians against a corrupt state status quo. So did the results of Oct. 7 chasten these journalistic elites? Hardly - starting with the Washington Post's David Broder, the earnest pundit who's often considered the nonpartisan conscience of the media establishment. For decades, Broder has lamented voter apathy, saying low turnout encourages unresponsive politicians and the growth of special-interest power. So when the recall comes along and engages voters like no election in recent memory, Broder is elated, right? Wrong. His post-recall column dismissed the effort as "miserable" and "misguided." It's good for the public to be engaged, you see, only if the public is in sync with him.

"A checklist for terminating programs" by David Nott, President of the Los Angeles-based Reason Foundation

"For the people to win, politics as usual must lose," Gov.-elect Arnold Schwarzenegger said in his victory speech Tuesday. "I want to reach out to everybody."

That’s a serious departure from the Terminator’s campaign rhetoric about “cleaning house” in Sacramento. And it makes his transformation even more evident; Schwarzenegger has gone from actor to Governor.

Schwarzenegger has laid out a thoughtful plan for his first 100 days in office, saying he will, among other things, repeal the tripling of the car tax; push for a state spending limit; reform the workers’ compensation system; and obtain a detailed audit of state finances.

To implement these changes, and to be an effective leader, Schwarzenegger will unquestionably have to compromise with the Democrat-controlled state Legislature, and this is where things get dicey, particularly with the audit.

The state budget deficit for the fiscal year starting July 1, 2004, is estimated at anywhere from $8 billion to $20 billion, and a meticulous audit of the state’s finances will undoubtedly uncover additional problems and creative accounting.

Combine that with the fact that a court has already nixed $2 billion in bonds for state pensions and could very well strike down another $10 billion in planned bonds because voters never approved them, and we have the makings of a full-fledged budget disaster all over again.

The only way to deal with a mess of this magnitude is structural change, starting with Arnold’s audit.

As part of the inspection, each and every state program should be required to justify its existence by demonstrating relevance and results.

Longtime politicians and special interest groups like to scare people with cries of, “If the state cuts spending we’ll lose vital services and suffer dire consequences.” So let’s use the audit to define those consequences and make informed decisions about what is, and what isn’t, important.

We shouldn’t assume that since a program exists, it is needed. To continue, programs must answer key questions: Does the program provide an essential service to taxpayers and the state?

What do they spend and what do they accomplish?

Are the programs’ functions still needed or are they outdated and duplicative?

If the program were eliminated would anyone miss it?

Programs that cannot prove their necessity to taxpayers should be temporarily suspended during this fiscal crisis and reevaluated at a later date.

In conjunction with the audit, the state should establish an ongoing assessment on all state programs, modeled after the 10-member Sunset Advisory Commission in Texas. The Sunset Commission issues a report on each agency with a recommendation to abolish or continue the agency; holds public hearings on its findings; and sets a date on which an agency will be eliminated unless legislation is passed to continue its functions. As a result, 44 agencies have been abolished and another 11 have been consolidated.

Showing the proverbial bank statement will make policymakers accountable for results. If they continue to fund programs, against the commission’s advice, they’ll have to explain their reasoning and defend the expense.

The $38 billion deficit this year didn’t motivate California legislators to take a critical look at their spending habits, but the resounding recall results demonstrating Californians’ rabid thirst for fiscal responsibility and transparency just might.

Before the election, Senate leader John Burton, a San Francisco Democrat, said of Schwarzenegger’s plans for reform: “I think he’s got a little bit to learn. He ought to wait until he’s elected.” Well he’s been elected now, and it’s the Legislature’s leader and his colleagues who have a little bit to learn: Californians are ready to make tough choices and critically evaluate government spending. And we’re expecting Sacramento to do the same.

Another John Carroll fisking.

LA Times editor John Carroll defends himself. Hugh Hewitt gives Carrolls defense a fisking.

Mark Steyn:

the Independent frets that, in jurisdictions like California, fear of a Davis-style recall "militates against the strong but unpopular action that governments have to take from time to time". Really? Isn't the more common problem that, in California as in Europe, an entrenched top-down political culture finds it far too easy to take "strong but unpopular action"? It's strong but popular action that governments seem to find hard to take - cutting taxes, enforcing immigration law, reining in inefficient bureaucratic spending, standing up to entrenched special interests, whether it's Indian tax-free gambling in California or French farmers ...

California's problem was that it was beginning to take on the characteristics of an EU state, not just in its fiscal incoherence but in its assumption that politics was a private dialogue between a lifelong political class and a like-minded media ..

The "Arnold Effect" -- in Germany. Quotable:

The straight-talking Hollywood action star's election win in California has had an electrifying impact on Germany, leading to calls Friday for top politicians to voice clear ideas in simple language or be swept away at the polls.

"The more confused we are by what they say, the greater our longing for a man or woman with simple words," wrote Bild newspaper columnist Franz Josef Wagner. "The only problem is that it's the wrong ones who usually master simple language."

Schwarzenegger's victory in the California race for governor has led to editorials calling for German politicians to abandon their barely comprehensible speaking style in favor of "Klartext" (straight talk).

But Wagner and others also warn of the dangers of falling for simple remedies from loud Austrians who enthrall the masses.

(via Instapundit)

Here's the Bear Flag roundup -- thanks to Miller's Time.

Thomas Sowell -- Is California crazy?:

The California recall election and its surrounding hoopla may have confirmed the suspicions of some people in other parts of the country that Californians are crazy. But not all Californians are crazy -- just the most affluent and highly educated ones.

Although the state as a whole voted to remove the disastrous Governor Gray Davis from office by 55 percent to 45 percent, he received a solid majority of support in most of the upscale northern California coastal counties.

In San Mateo County, where the average home costs more than half a million dollars and the environmentalists reign supreme, keeping the vast majority of the land off-limits to building, 63 percent of the voters wanted Gray Davis to remain in office. In even more upscale Marin County, 68 percent of the voters were for Gray Davis. And in San Francisco, the furthest left of them all, no less than 80 percent voted to keep Gray Davis as governor.

There is a certain irony here, since the Democrats like to portray themselves as the party of the working people, with special solicitude for "the children" and for minorities. But working people, families with children and blacks are precisely the kinds of people who have been forced out of these three affluent and politically correct counties.

All three of these ultra-liberal counties have been losing black population since the previous census. Kindergartens in San Mateo County are shutting down for lack of children. The number of children in San Francisco has also gone down since the last census, even though the population of the city as a whole has gone up.

Out in the valleys to which those who are not as affluent have been forced to flee, in order to find something resembling affordable housing, the vote was just as solidly against Davis as it was for him among those further up the income scale. Out where ordinary people live, the vote against Governor Davis was 64 percent in Merced County, 72 percent in Tulare County and 75 percent in Lassen County.

The time is long overdue to get rid of the outdated notion that liberal Democrats represent ordinary people. They represent such special interests as trial lawyers who keep our courts clogged with frivolous lawsuits, busybody environmentalists who think the government should force other people to live the way the greens want them to live, and of course the teachers' unions who think schools exist to provide their members with jobs.

Many of these people are over-educated, in the sense that they have spent many years in institutions which have propagandized them with the politically correct vision of the world -- even if they have not taught them much history, economics, or other mundane things.

Someone has said that people are not born stupid, but are made that way by education. Certainly that is true of what too often passes for education these days. You don't have to be crazy to want to keep Governor Gray Davis in office, but it helps.

This is the same Gray Davis who recently signed a bill to allow illegal aliens to get California driver's licenses. Using driver's licenses as identification, illegal aliens can now do pretty much whatever a citizen can do. Given our lax election laws, that probably includes voting.

Although Governor Davis is best known for the blackouts that his crazy policies on electricity brought on, he has been versatile in the havoc he has wreaked. Nor is he through yet. He could get writer's cramp from all the bills and appointments he signs before leaving office.

What can Governor-elect Arnold Schwarzenegger do for California? Given the Democrats' solid control of the state legislature, Arnold is unlikely to get any laws passed reflecting his own views.

Nevertheless the new governor will have a line-item veto to cut back on some of the reckless spending that California's liberal Democrats specialize in. More than that, Schwarzenegger can use the bully pulpit of his office to educate the public on what is wrong with the bills he vetoes.

In short, he can promote sanity among the electorate, so that they do not keep putting in office the kind of people who make others wonder if Californians are crazy.

A toast from Austrians Alfred Gerstl and Albert Kaufmann to Arnold Schwarzenegger
the hometown boy -- and neo-nazi ass-kicker -- whose made it big in America.

"My candidate can beat Gray Davis and Cruz Bustamante with one McClintock tied behind his back." -- Darrell Issa.

Note also -- Karl Rove calls the Schwarzenegger win a "rebranding" opportunity for California Republicans.

Larry Kudlow -- Schwarzenegger will pump up limited government Republicans nationwide.

Winning changes everything -- Fresh Potatoes has the goods on on the car-tax flip-flop at the LA Times. Does John Carroll ever get embarrassed?

Rush Limbaugh's statement on his addiction. Audio.

Among all the business folks and political hacks -- one very impressive Schwarzenegger transition team member:

Annelise Anderson -- Dr. Anderson is a Fellow of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. She was Associate Director of the Office of Management and Budget in the Reagan Administration and focused on domestic budget policy. Prior to her service in the federal government, she was Professor of Economics and Finance at California State University, Hayward. Dr. Anderson earned her Ph.D. in Business Administration from Columbia University. She served on the Commission on Privatization in the Reagan Administration and Governor Pete Wilson's Council of Economic Advisors. Palo Alto.

Let's all hope Anderson is among the few who do the actual work of this transition "team".

More politically inspired "science" from Berkeley's Professor Henry Brady. Mickey Kaus is on the story:

Punch-card foe Henry Brady of Berkeley now claims that 176,000 votes were lost in the recall election due to punch-card balloting systems. But if the S.F. Chronicle's report is right, he gets this figure by comparing total ballots cast with total votes on the yes/no recall. Ballots without a vote on the yes/no question are presumed to be votes that were cast but somehow not counted due to malfunctioning voting mechanisms. But why weren't they intentional abstentions--for example, Latino Bustamante voters who hate Davis but couldn't bring themselves to vote "yes" on the recall, or who just rushed to the second part of the ballot? Here's the Chronicle's explanation:

Part of the difference resulted from voters who chose not to vote on the recall, but based on past experience, most of the disparity consisted of votes that were cast but not counted, Brady said.

I don't see how Brady knows this. True, the number of "missing" votes varies between counties. But the big counties with punch cards (i.e. Los Angeles) also seem to be counties with large Latino populations that may have abstained in the manner described above. Brady would have to figure out some way of correcting for the proportion of Bustamante voters, or any other supporters of other candidates who might abstain on some other basis. That L.A. County showed even more missing votes than other punch card counties ("nearly 9 percent" versus an average of 7.7 percent) suggests that some factor other than punch cards was at work. ... I await Prof. Hasen's upcoming column, or a link to Brady's full study. But a previous Brady anti-punch-card study was so flawed it left Harvard Prof. Laurence Tribe, who had to defend it in court, humiliated on national television by Judge Alex Kozinski. And Brady's rush into the headlines--in time to let the obnoxious ACLU attorney Mark Rosenbaum declare a "defacing of democracy"--is not reassuring. ...

Overheard in the Beltway yesterday: Conservatives discussing the Arnold win: How bad will he be for conservatives:

Conservative #1: Well, he has read Hayek.

Conservative #2: He may have read Hayek, but he sleeps with Maria.

-- The Corner

First there was Pumping Iron. Now there's going to be a Schwarzenegger for Governor documentary. Title suggestions?

The boys from the gym give their congratulations to "the oak".

Talk radio and California's bloodless coup d'etat.

PrestoPundit -- 50,000 unique visitors and counting ..

Think he knew something the rest of us didn't?

Madsen Pirie, the president of the Adam Smith Institute, is feeling pretty smug. Three years ago he wagered £100 at 25-1 on Arnold Schwarzenegger becoming the next governor of California.

And this isn't the only reason Mr. Pirie is pleased as punch about Mr. Schwarzenegger's victory.

Goodbye Sacramento .. Hello Las Vegas!!

UPDATE: Poynter Online:

Note to WashPost: LAT's Rivenburg sometimes pens satire A Los Angeles Times staffer writes: "Do you remember when the China News Agency lifted as straight news a satiric piece from TheOnion? It seemed the Chinese did not get satire. The same apparently holds true for the District of Columbia. The Washington Post has just done the same thing to the LATimes. The LAT has run a hilarious recall feature for many weeks by Roy Rivenburg -- totally satiric and fictional exaggerating and distorting all the crazy recall stuff. On Oct. 5, the WashPost published this (last paragraph) on the Las Vegas tiger attack:"The illusionists have also played a role in the California recall election. The Los Angeles Times has reported that their manager, Bernie Yuman, contributed $150 in Belgian chocolates to the campaign of Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger, while Gov. Gray Davis (D) pledged in August that he would fight to retain his job "like one of those cool white tigers owned by Siegfried and Roy."

It's clearly based on an Aug. 5 LAT satire: July 23: On the campaign trail, Davis vows to "fight the recall like a Bengal tiger." When informed that Bengal tigers are on the verge of extinction, Davis pledges to "fight like Tony the Tiger." Aug. 7: Davis resumes his tiger theme, this time promising to "fight like one of those cool white tigers owned by Siegfried and Roy. Or maybe like Tiger Woods, whichever sounds meaner."

More Governor Schwarzenegger cartoons.

I can't resist. One more.

Bill Bradley vists the Schwarzenegger suites at the Century Plaza on election night.

And George Will goes on a one man riot against California conservatives. Quotable:

These Schwarzenegger conservatives -- now, there is an oxymoron for these times -- have embraced a man who is, politically, Hollywood's culture leavened by a few paragraphs of Milton Friedman.

The Heritage Foundation's "Townhall" has a page full of links to commentary on the California election here.

Variety calls the race to replace, and the winner is talk radio. (free trial subscription required)

As always, Rough & Tumble sorts through the race to replace news so you and I don't have to. (Great job Jack. And many thanks for the link to PrestoPundit. And thanks most of all for the great site.)

Hugh Hewitt does a fisking on the Los Angeles Times -- and then offers some constructive advice:

Hire Weintraub back. Carol S. drove him away, so throw some money at him and get instant respect from all sides.

Make Max Boot a regular contributor – twice weekly – and find a David Brooks equivalent to go with him.

Find a general columnist who isn't as predictable as your current line-up, and encourage him or her to talk to a few center-right people.

But primarily add or transfer talented reporters who understand budgets and interest groups and politics. When you throw amateurs at a story, you get amateur results. It showed throughout the budget crisis last summer, and glared throughout the recall.

UPDATE: "In the long run, I believe this will strengthen the paper's relationship with the readers" -- Times editor John Carroll on the Gropenator story.

The Wall Street Journal in a short piece titled Earthquake Arnold :

Special congratulations belong to California's voters, who proved all of the national mockery wrong. They were perfectly capable of separating the Ariannas from the serious candidates as well as the serious issues from last-minute political hits. The people who should be embarrassed are members of the press corps, both state and national, who were too busy sneering to see the real story: a brewing popular revolt unlike any since Proposition 13 a generation ago.

Media Research Center's Tim Graham on national press coverage of the California recall election. Graham leaves out the most significant fact about national political reporting on the race -- how often that reporting was simply factually bankrupt. This went for national reporting of all types and from all camps. The national guys were simply cluesless when it came to the California race. One exception, was John Fund's excellent Political Diary. But of course, this really wasn't an exception, because Fund has a California background as a former research analyst for the California legislature.

Professor Glenn Reynolds suggests that -- short of outright war -- recall elections might be just the thing for breaking up the stranglehold of special interests. Quotable:

.. people who criticize the whole idea of recalls as anti-democratic are missing something .. Recalls aren’t anti-democratic. They are, if anything, anti-republican — by which I mean that they’re inconsistent with the “republican principle” of representative government over direct democracy .. And representative government, for reasons that Madison, et al., spelled out in The Federalist, is a good thing. But it’s not the only good thing. A danger faced by all governments — including representative governments — is the danger that they will be taken over and paralyzed by what economist Mancur Olson, in a famous book titled The Rise and Decline of Nations, called a “web of special interests.” Because it pays for special interest groups and politicians to collude, lining their pockets at the taxpayers’ expense, Olson argued that nations — and perhaps especially representative ones — would tend toward paralysis over time, as special interest groups locked up government revenues and fought off changes. That sounds a lot like what has happened in California, where the power of public employee unions and other special interests has gotten the state into a political and budgetary crisis from which it’s now trying to escape, but where the very same political structure, pre-recall, made it impossible to fix things because any serious change would threaten too many powerful interests. Olson wrote that it would take a major shock to break the web of special interests — he noted that Germany and Japan recovered so well after World War II in part because pre-existing special interest relationships were disrupted — and wondered at America’s comparative freedom from special interest webs given its long history of the same kind of government ..

But the bottom line is that, short of a war, the recall process is a pretty good method of breaking up the web of special interests. All the cozy lobbyist-and-campaign-contribution relationships that existed under the Gray Davis regime will be rather drastically changed in the Schwarzenegger administration. And that’s probably a good thing for California’s long-term prospects, regardless of whether you think Arnold will be a good governor or not.

The recall process has hit the California political community like a thunderbolt. It’s the voters’ way of signaling that they’re mad as hell, and don’t want to take it anymore. And it’s a way for them to shake up a political apparatus that (as California voters certainly seemed to think) has been serving its own needs, not theirs. And it’s better than a war!

Citizen Smash has a breakdown of some of the California recall numbers. Quotable:

102 thousand more people voted for Schwarzenegger than voted to keep Davis; 68 thousand more people voted for Schwarznegger than voted for Davis in last year’s general election.

As I pointed out below, Gray Davis owed his job to support in two places, the Bay Area (enveloping the immediate coastline) and the Los Angeles area. And as I said, he was going down because he had lost his grip in LA. And the numbers today show exactly that. Here is a county-by-county map showing how Davis's support held in the Bay Area (where Davis actually did much better in San Francisco this time), but fell apart in the Los Angeles area -- dipped to just above 50% in Los Angeles County itself -- and evaporated completely in all of the outlying counties of Los Angeles:

70% for recall in San Bernardino County
63% for recall in Ventura County
70% for recall in Riverside County
73% for recall in Orange County
76% for recall in Kern County

And here are the numbers from 2002.

And here is the map of the race to replace showing Schwarzenegger grabbing support across the state and in the Los Angeles area -- everywhere except the Bay Area.

Davis lost it in Los Angeles, and with it the governorship of California.

UPDATE: California Insider has his own "green state" "red state" analysis.

The Election Returns -- from the Sec. of State.

The NY Times California recall page has a helpful "flash" graphic called "Inside the Recall" with county-by-county population and 2002 voting stats. The map makes it clear that Davis has been the chosen governor of one-third of the state -- essentially Los Angeles and the Bay Area. In the 2003 recall fight the key battleground has been Los Angeles County -- Davis is struggling to retain overwhelming margins in his hometown, and he's been in Los Angeles constantly throughout the recall battle. But his firm grip on the county has slipped badly -- despite well publicized support efforts from the county's dominant newspaper. And the difference this time seems to have been all of those commuters on endless miles of LA freeway -- listening to the relentless air-war against Gray Davis on the radio. I have no doubt the average KFI listener in Los Angeles could tell you more about the California budget and current legislation coming out of Sacramento than could half-a-dozen hacks picked at random from the LA Times. And they would be more passionate about it. In the contest between the ground-war of the Davis-supporting LA Times, and the air-war of the radio news-talk stations, the ground-war hasn't stood a chance.

On election night perhaps the central stat to keep track of will be the Davis "no on recall" margins in Los Angeles county. If all those folks in all of those cars make it to the polls, look for "shock and awe" from the ballot box as the returns roll in -- and modern talk-radio air-warriors blow apart the LA Times ground-war in the battle for the hearts and minds of LA County voters.

And then the next thing to do is to take a look in the outlying anti-Davis counties -- San Bernardino, Ventura, Kern, Riverside, and Orange. What you should see here -- if the "shock and awe" air war has indeed done its job -- are near landslide "yes on recall" numbers. These are all areas where the gray ground-war monopoly has battled and retreated in the contest for dominant market share. And these are the sore-butt counties of Southern California -- the air-warrior home ground of the California recall movement. When the national press reports the California eathquake tomorrow night, that earthquake will have its ground zero literally up and down the San Andreas fault -- stretching from Kern County just north of Los Angeles, down to Riverside and San Diego Counties, east and south of LA. That eathquake is going to shake the political establishment of California down to its foundations -- and with it the editorial rooms in just about every major city in the state.

UPDATE: Andrew Sullivan hears the rumbling and senses a tectonic plate shift in the political culture of the nation .. oh, and Sullivan thinks Mickey Kaus is a wuss.

UPDATE: Calblog is hosting an election party. Drop in on the fun.

UPDATE: They're taking California recall election predictions at NRO's The Corner.

UPDATE: Roger Simon is doing it for the first time.

A bellwether? Howard Owens' stepfather -- a natural "hands-down" McClintock supporter -- is voting Schwarzenegger.

Don't we love the Times! KFI's John Kobylt identified the LA Times today as "an enemy combatant" in the war between taxpayers and the Democrat-lobbyist spending machine in Sacramento. Mickey Kaus described, quote:

months of generally ponderous, embarrassingly biased and almost willfully misinformed recall coverage

from the Times over the course of the last few months.

Hugh Hewitt wonders if "Tuesday's vote has also become a referendum on the believability of the Los Angeles Times", and points out the shoddy and slanted reporting on the cover of Monday's pre-election edition of the Times.

Making PrestoPundit jealous -- Patterico fisks Steve Lopez. I really wanted to whack Sunday's Lopez column around the block -- but spent most of the day working. I work weekends at a major retailer which has cut commission sales wages by 2 - 5 dollars in the last year. (Read Patterico to see why this comes to mind). I make enough working Saturdays and Sundays (I take care of the kids during the week) to just about cover the family's state and local taxes.

The wife of a retiree at the store told me that in the old days a salemen for the retailer could support a stay-at-home wife and kids. The "old days" were the '70s and '80s. But what I have noticed even in the time I've been there is that most all of the 10 and 20 year native born sales force has quit the store -- and the sales staff has become largely foreign born (from all parts of the globe) as wages have fallen (that suppy- demand thing). Some on the sales staff are literally selling and learning English at the same time. The wife of this retiree now herself works --- as a bureaucrat for the INS. When I told a fellow saleman that I'd run into her, the person off-handedly said, "oh, I've got to call her and ask her a question" on some problem she faces with her visa or green card, or something. A bit of blogger reporting from one of my little corners of the world.

Calbog on why to vote Schwarzenegger.

The latest from Bill Bradley on the LA Times and its complicity with the Democrat Party. Read the piece to the end to see again how the Times just makes stuff -- all the more to slant the news.

"Embrace the Puke" Gray Davis requests it, and Bill Lockyer delivers -- the AG wants to investigate Schwarzenegger for sexual battery and sexual harassment, even though the statute of limitations (one year) has run out on every allegation so-far brought against Schwarzenegger. That's right, you heard it correctly, AG Bill Lockyer has answered Gray Davis's request, and has joined the Davis in the last minute orgy of anti-Schwarzenegger "puke politics". Now, just who is surprised by that? Lockyer spoke out at a Gray Davis campaign event.

Peter Jennings interviews Schwarzenegger -- transcript. Jennings is still pushing the truth of ABC's erroneous "Schwarzenegger is a Hitler lover" storyline, even after it is debunked, and even after Schwarzenegger directly denies it. Here is Jennings: "It is, after all, your past. It isn't made up, is it?"

And then when Schwarzenegger says that none of the women raising charges ever called him on it is in the past, Jennings sees a chance to suggest that Schwarzenegger is "blaming the victim", throwing out this stinkbomb: "Are you blaming the women?"

This is a rather pathetic form of "gotcha" journalism. The press does suck, and the suck starts at the top with the NY Times and the major networks, and it only picks up steam as you go downhill to papers like the LA Times. A useful site with full coverage of the Democrat press, its bias and its incompetence, is the Media Research Center.

The Brokaw-Schwarzenegger interview -- transcript. Brokaw says that Schwarzenegger's alleged actions are criminal. All the lawyers and law professors I've read on the matter say the opposite. Is Brokaw making it up as he goes? Or is he simply reading directly from the Davis campaign talking points memo?

Tim Graham weighs in:

It's just a slimefest in the morning these days. NBC's "Today" featured Tom Brokaw's interview with Arnold, and Brokaw lectured Arnold that some of these groping matters could be considered criminal. Isn't that cute? Tom Brokaw could never even let the words "Juanita Broaddrick" escape his lips -- and now he's lecturing Arnold [about sexual assualt] ...

UPDATE: Tim Graham has more:

Tom Brokaw on why the Paula Jones allegations, which became a very large legal problem for Bill Clinton: "Why didn't we put it on earlier? It didn't seem, I think to most people, entirely relevant to what was going on at the time. These are the kinds of charges raised about the President before. They had been played out in the Gennifer Flowers episode. The American public had made a kind of decision about his personal conduct and whether it had relevance in his personal life. And it seemed at that time it didn't have the news weight." That's Brokaw on the CNBC show "Tim Russert," May 9, 1994, on avoiding the Jones allegations for three months.

Drudge leads Sunday night with moldy news from Thursday! I guess we can either count that as a political endorsement from Drudge, or we can say that news on dead trees has scooped Drudge by several days. Or maybe he's only pulling out the stops again to hype his only in LA Sunday late-night radio broadcast.

10,000 cheer Schwarzenegger in Sacramento. Quotable:

"He doesn't draw as big a crowd as Hitler did"

-- Bob Mulholland, California Democrat party operative.

UPDATE: Don't miss Bill Bradley on the Schwarzenegger rally, the latest poll data and more.

100% of voters -- give or take the margin of error -- are following the recall election "very" or "somewhat" closely.

UPDATE: Worth remembering -- this election is already one-fifth over, depending on the turnout. LA county has had long lines at the touch screen voting machines for days. Elections don't take place on a single "snapshot" day anymore.

LA Times -- it's working.

Roy Rivenburg's golden recall diary memories. Outtakes:

July 24: Davis slams the recall as "a right-wing coup designed to hijack state government from the Indian casinos, state employee unions and other special interests who bought Sacramento fair and square."

Aug. 13: Although Davis can't legally run on the second part of the ballot, a mysterious Dave Gravis announces his candidacy.

Oct. 3: After unidentified sources plant charges that Schwarzenegger once praised Hitler, Leno chimes in, "The odd thing is, Hitler is now three points ahead of Gray Davis in the polls."

And there's more. Don't miss what Rivenburg slipped into the LA Times with his Oct. 4 diary entry.

Bill Bradley:

The Times maintains that none of the women came forward at the behest of Schwarzenegger’s opponents. That claim, however, is looking increasingly dubious. One of the three women in the story says she came forward at the urging of Jodie Evans, described by the Times as a peace activist and "co-founder of the women’s peace group Code Pink." At best, this is an incomplete, misleading description.

Here’s what the newspaper should have said about Evans. She is actually a former close colleague of Gov. Gray Davis, a longtime Democratic operative and a friend of noted Democratic hit man Bob Mulholland. Evans is also the ex-wife of Westside financier Max Palevsky, the man who gave Gray Davis his first job in politics as the fund-raiser in Tom Bradley’s 1973 mayoral campaign. Oops! Someone should have told John Carroll, the Times editor and anti-bias crusader ...

"Join the Boycott" a "cyber connected" group of "Friends of Israel" have been boycotting the LA Times from some time now. They don't support Schwarzenegger, but they do see the late election coverage of the Times as part of a pattern of bias at the paper.

UPDATE: "No" on L.A. Times, "Yes" on Recall.

Man bites dog. The New York Times goes after The National Enquirer for biased news coverage. Not enough sleaze, charges the NY Times.

Sexual harasser Bill Clinton throws away the Don't Call list, bombarding California voters with automated telephone calls for the Gray Davis political campaign. (Yes, I know that politicians gave themselves an exemption from the law).

Fresh Potatoes walks the precinct:

Today, I visited every household containing a Republican voter in my precinct and in the neighboring precinct. Of the approximately 75 people I met and spoke with (some folks weren't home), I found two (probably McClintock) people who were non-committal on Schwarzenegger. No one talked about the groping allegations. No one talked about the bogus Nazi allegation. A few people said that they were backing Schwarzenegger and not McClintock because thought Schwarzenegger could win. Otherwise there is solid -- almost unanimous -- support among Republicans for Schwarzenegger in the two precincts I walked.

He also gets great fan mail.

1,000 reader cancellations and counting. I ran into a woman today at lunch whose daughter was one of the 400+ cancellers who called the LA Times to give the paper a piece of her mind. It's a household were both parents work full time jobs, and the grandmother takes care of the kids. It's a four car household, and the Davis tax is going to clobber them over the head like a sledgehammer when it comes due in the mail. The grandmother is average jane former Democrat who now votes Republican, and who knew an amazing amount about state politics and the state's budge problems. She reads the Times (or did until last week), but gets most of her news from radio, including KFI Los Angeles. She knew all about Bustamante, knew more than I do about bills being signed by Davis -- and she is a huge Schwarzenegger fan. She thinks McClintock is too conservative for California, and thinks the LA Times is out to get Schwarzenegger because its "so liberal". She didn't care at all about Schwarzenegger's groping, and condemned the women coming forward for not saying something earlier. It is all dirty politics in her mind -- the dirty politics of the LA Times.

Well, so much for my random sampling of the California electoriate two days out from the election.

Postscript -- I ran into the lady when she sat down to read my LA Times at the table while I was in line getting lunch. (smiley thing here).

Oh, and quotable from the article:

the [LA Times] reporters had just made "cold calls" to people working in the film industry and women listed in the credits of movies starring Schwarzenegger [according to John Carroll, editor of the Times].

Quotable:

"Schwarzenegger himself has said that he is guilty of acts of this kind."

-- PrestoPundit, on Schwarzenegger's unacceptable behavior with women.

That said, now read this. And a bit of PrestoPunditry -- I really dont' think the argument made [Arnold supporters are clamming up when it comes to Schwarzenegger's own admission of guilt] is true of the "Join Schwarzenegger" blogosphere -- and it may not be true of all that many in the general public. "Where there is smoke there is fire" -- a pretty clear statement, and everybody, I think, got it. If you didn't get it, raise your hand.

UPDATE: I had Schwarzenegger's initial full admission up on the web before anyone else, pieced together (at first) from fragments in various wire service reports. I have a life outside of blogging, so I haven't been able to get everything on the blog -- I started blogging the individual public accusers, before the numbers became to much for me, and the kids came down with colds, and needed extra (nighttime) attention.

UPDATE: Schwarzenegger has all along said that many of the specific charges against his are not true, and that some types of charges against him are not true. So it is a distortion to say that Schwarzenegger all along has said that he has done all of the kinds of things charged against him. He's actually consistently and repeatedly said just the opposite. To imply or state otherwise -- as the press repeatedly has done -- is to get the story wrong .. not that there is anything new or shocking about the press getting a story wrong, mind you.

boifromtroy does the Bear Flag League roundup. (yes, I know, I know, I do need to update my Bear Flag League link list).

Have you cancelled the LA Times? If you have, I'd like to hear your story, in the comments section.

UPDATE: The number to call to cancel is 1-800-252-9141. I've cancelled the paper so many times it's silly for me even to think of ever subscribing to the paper again -- but every football season I get the urge to re-subscribe. In fact, my wife did attempt to subscribe for Sunday only service (she likes the coupons) -- but the paper botched our subscription, and we're still waiting for it to arrive. Who knows what happened. We live in a new area, and perhaps the Times can't figure out where the house is. The Times no-delivery people assured us when we tried calling them that the paper would be at the house later in the day. Of course, we never got a paper.

Anger, cancellations for the LA Times.

Daniel Weintraub reminds us of what it's all about. Quotable:

Davis had become the modern-day equivalent of the California pols who did the railroads' bidding. He raised and spent a record $70 million clinging to office in 2002, including $10 million to help defeat a moderate Republican, former Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan, in that party's primary. Capitol lobbyists groused privately that it took $100,000 in contributions just to secure a meeting with the governor, and the president of the California Teachers' Association complained that Davis hit him up for $1 million while they discussed education policy in the governor's office.

Much of the governor's war chest came from the state's public employee unions, and he rewarded them handsomely. While most rank-and-file government workers got decent raises and a modest pension boost, Davis gave his biggest donors favored treatment. The prison guards got a 30-percent-plus raise over five years and a promise of pensions that would let them retire with 90 percent of their salary at age 50. Within weeks after the contract was signed, the correctional officers' union, which had spent $2.3 million helping Davis get elected, dropped another $250,000 into his campaign kitty.

Film producer and Codepink activist Patricia Foulkrod on Schwarzenegger and Clinton:

She admitted that Bill Clinton sexual peccadilloes were as inexcusable as Arnold's. "The difference is that Clinton was so brilliant," she said. "If Arnold was a brilliant pol and had this thing about inappropriate behavior, we'd figure a way of getting around it. I think it's to our detriment to go on too much about the groping. But it's our way in. This is really about the GOP trying to take California in 2004 and our trying to stop it."

Andrew Sullivan:

BILL AND ARNOLD: What's the difference, some ask? Item one: Clinton was faced with actual civil lawsuits, claiming sexual harrassment. Once private life gets dragged into the courts, the press has no option but to cover it. Item two: most of Clinton's sexual targets were women who worked for him or were under his direct authority. Some of Arnold's targets were on movie sets where he certainly had social power but where he was, as far as I know, not the owner or direct boss. Item three: none of Arnold's incidents involve actual sex, or exposure of sex organs, or alleged rape, whereas Clinton's did. Item four: Arnold has fessed up. Clinton lied under oath. Item five: Arnold hasn't exactly gone around saying he is a champion of women's rights and the dignity of women. Clinton did ...

Stephen Moore -- the case for Schwarzenegger.

Jill Stewart

LA Times Covers Up Davis Violence on Female Staff -- Paper Put Two Hit Teams on Arnold, Zero Hit Team on Davis (Oct 4, 2003) ~ By Jill Stewart

I couldn't have been more shocked to see the lurid stories about Arnold Schwarzenegger and the things several women allege he uttered or did to them. But it wasn't over the allegations, which I had read much of in a magazine before. I was most shocked at the Los Angeles Times.

Some politicos dub the Thursday before a big election "Dirty Tricks Thursday." That's the best day for an opponent to unload his bag of filth against another candidate, getting maximum headlines, while giving his stunned opponent no time to credibly investigate or respond to the charges.

It creates a Black Friday, where the candidate spends a precious business day right before the election desperately investigating the accusations, before facing a weekend in which reporters only care about further accusations that invariably spill out of the woodwork.

Dirty Tricks Thursday is not used by the media to sink a campaign.

Yet the Times managed to give every appearance of trying to do so. It's nothing short of journalistic malpractice when a paper mounts a last-minute attack that can make or break one of the most important elections in California history. The Times looked even more biased by giving two different reasons for publishing its gruesome article at the last minute.

Now, there's no time left before the election to separate fact from fiction regarding incidents that happened as long as 20 and 30 years ago.

I should disclose here that I know one of Schwarzenegger's accusers. She is a friendly acquaintance. I have no idea whether she was actually man-handled.

Is it possible that my acquaintance told friends a tall tale, after meeting Schwarzenegger, because back then it made a young woman terribly exotic if one of the hottest beefcakes in the world wouldn't keep his paws off you?

I have no idea. Or, could she be telling the truth? I have no idea. And neither does the Los Angeles Times.

If the Times were a tabloid, this would hardly matter. But the newspaper is influential at times, and claims it has high standards. In this case, the paper gave in to its bias against Schwarzenegger:

Here's my proof:

Since at least 1997, the Times has been sitting on information that Gov. Gray Davis is an "office batterer" who has attacked female members of his staff, thrown objects at subservients, and launched into red-faced fits, screaming the f-word until staffers cower.

I published a lengthy article on Davis and his bizarre dual personality at the now-defunct New Times Los Angeles on Nov. 27, 1997, as well as several articles with similar information later on.

The Times was onto the story, too, and we crossed paths. My article, headlined "Closet Wacko Vs. Mega Fibber," detailed how Davis flew into a rage one day because female staffers had rearranged framed artwork on the walls of his office.

He so violently shoved his loyal, 62-year-old secretary out of a doorway that she suffered a breakdown, and refused to ever work in the same room with him. She worked at home, in an arrangement with state officials, then worked in a separate area where she was promised Davis would not go. She finally transferred to another job, desperate to avoid him.

He left a message on her phone machine. Not an apology. Just a request that she resume work, with the comment, "You know how I am."

Another woman, a policy analyst, had the unhappy chore in the mid-1990s of informing Davis that a fundraising source had dried up. When she told Davis, she recounted, Davis began screaming the f-word at the top of his lungs.

The woman stood to demand that he stop speaking that way, and, she says, Davis grabbed her by her shoulders and "shook me until my teeth rattled. I was so stunned I said, 'Good God Gray! Stop and look at what you are doing. Think what you are doing to me!'"

After my story ran, I waited for the Times to publish its story. It never did. When I spoke to a reporter involved, he said editors at the Times were against attacking a major political figure using anonymous sources.

Just what they did last week to Schwarzenegger.

Weeks ago, Times editors sent two teams of reporters to dig dirt on Schwarzenegger, one on his admitted use of steroids as a bodybuilder, one on the old charges of groping women from Premiere Magazine.

Who did the editors assign, weeks ago, to investigate Davis' violence against women who work for him?

Nobody.

The paper's protection of Davis is proof, on its face, of the gross bias within the paper. If Schwarzenegger is elected governor, it should be no surprise if Times reporters judge him far more harshly than they ever judged Davis.

Roger Simon:

According to the most recent poll,the LA Times is failing miserably in its attempt to bring Schwarzenegger down. Arnold's percentages are actually going up as the Times continues to fan the flames of the scandal. What's interesting to me is that the paper didn't see that coming. It is a rather surprising example of psychological naivete coupled with an equally extensive lack of self knowledge on the part of the editors and publisher.

Let's start with the obvious: The LA Times is a virtual monopoly and everyone in Los Angeles knows it and most don't like it. Sure the paper gets a tiny bit of competition from the LA Weekly, the Daily News and the OC Register, but the operative word is "tiny." The New York Times in no way sits astride NY the way the LA Times sits astride LA. New York has a vibrant, competitive newspaper culture; LA has a dead newspaper culture.

Still, LA has a reasonably informed populace and that populace knows when the paper is using its monopoly to bully someone, even if that someone is a movie star with giant pecs ...

Read it all.

The National Democrat party takes part in the Schwarzenegger "Hitler" smear. Quotable:

The Democratic National Committee issued a resolution Saturday calling on Schwarzenegger to apologize for the alleged Hitler remarks. The Republican gubernatorial front-runner dismissed the move as "sleaze politics" and said for the third consecutive day that he despises Hitler.

Schwarzenegger attacks the LA Times. Quotable:

I think they're part of trying to derail my campaign, I mean part of the puke campaign that Davis launched now ... They want to see Gray Davis in there.

A short history of the California recall.

PUKE! Gray Davis calls on Bill Lockyer to investigate Schwarzeneggers sex behavior. Someone please remind me what Bill Lockyer said about Davis, puke politics, and the Democrat party.

Knight Ridder/NBC poll -- its 37 percent Schwarzenegger, 29 percent Boostmytaxes, and 15 percent McClintock.

Davis calls for a criminal investigation of Schwarzenegger for sexual battery. And interestingly enough, the Chronicle goes public with long spiked charges that Davis has physically assaulted one of his staff members. Quotable:

Schwarzenegger supporters .. raised issues about Davis' volatile temper, including an incident in which he allegedly threw an ashtray at a staff worker who later had to take a stress leave. Davis called the longtime employee and apologized on her answering machine, according to news reports of the incident.

New Republic "literary editor" Leon Wieseltier on Schwarzenegger in the bubble-heads column. Quotable:

"Schwarzenegger is obviously not anti-Semitic or an admirer of genocide," he said. "Hitler does not appear to have been his moral ideal, but his business model. His old fondness for the Führer is just another expression of the animating principle of his life and movies: the worship and steady acquisition of power. Sacramento is simply the biggest Hummer he can buy."

Note the McCarthite "fondness for Hitler" trope making the rounds of the second-hand thinkers on the left. Actually, the bubble-head scores some points and replays a few choice quotes from our not so distant past. Worth a read. (I can't believe I'm writing such a thing).

Lefty Stanford historian attacks Proposition 13, Schwarzenegger, those who believe in limited government -- and California voters. Did I leave anything out?

Another one has drunk the Kool-Aid. Quotable:

Reasonable people can debate whether this has anything to do with whether Arnold would be a good Governor. Under the circumstances of this election, reasonable people can vote for him, even knowing everything that has emerged regarding his groping tendencies. But reasonable people who have been following this would have to agree that the guy appears to have acted like a complete jerk for much of his life. The early indications of this .. were right. It can't be fun to be his wife right now.

Read the whole thing.

David Horowitz on Davis, the LA Times, and Hollywood, etc.. Quotable:

The frontpage lead story in today's paper [LA Times] trumpets Davis's slimely attack on Arnold Schwarzenegger based on the latest hate rumors dredged up from the Democrats' gossip mills and featured as news stories in the Times: "If true, [Schwarzenegger's] personal behaivor was disturbing and unacceptable and his professed admiration for Adolf Hitler unconscionable," Davis said. Where to begin? The "politics of personal destruction"? McCarthyite associations from an ancient past? The tabloid garbage which Davis and the Times are working off is years and sometimes decades old. He pinched an actress in Hollywood? That makes him a boy scout by industry standards. This is the town whose liberals give Academy Awards to their heroes who drug thirteen-year-olds and rape them. Not to mention Davis's own friend and chief promoter who in the White House poked a 20-year-old intern in the groin with a cigar, groped a widow and probably raped a nurse before that. And was defended by every Democratic pol, male and female alike, shrieking -- it's his private life! it has nothing to do with being President! etc. etc ...

Arnold Schwarzenegger -- neo-nazi ass-kicker. And the original (translated) neo-Nazi ass kicker story is here.

How the Democrat press reports on Democrats, and how the Democrat press reports on Republicans:

Tom Brokaw is not the only journalist or outlet to demonstrate a double standards and some hypocrisy in jumping on the allegations about Arnold Schwarzenegger’s inappropriate sexual advances when those same journalists and outlets delayed or downplayed the more serious Juanita Broaddrick charge that Bill Clinton raped her and, in late 1993, the Arkansas troopers’ claims about procuring women for Bill Clinton -- stories which both broke no where near election time and, therefore, the media should have been less reticent to report than a charge raised days before balloting.

It was the Los Angeles Times, in fact, which in December 1993 was the first mainstream media outlet to report the recollections of the troopers, but the networks didn’t find that anywhere near as newsworthy as this week’s LA Times story on Schwarzenegger.

Brit Hume recalled the LA Times’ hypocrisy, reporting in the “Grapevine” segment of his October 2 Special Report with Brit Hume on FNC: “The LA Times today ran a front page article, accompanied by two pages inside, on the accusations now lodged against Arnold Schwarzenegger for making unwanted advances years ago. Not until the tenth paragraph of that story do readers get a response from the Schwarzenegger camp. But, four years ago when then-President Clinton was being accused by Juanita Broaddrick -- remember her? -- of a brutal sexual assault 20 years earlier the LA Times buried that story on page 13 under a headline that read quote, 'Clinton Camp Denies Alleged Sex Assault.' And he article began with a denial from Mr. Clinton's lawyer.
“And when syndicated columnist George Will later wrote that quote, 'it is reasonable to believe that Clinton was a rapist 15 years before becoming President,' the Times cut that line out of the column.”

Tim Graham, the MRC’s Director of Media Analysis, passed along this summary of past media resistance to touching initial allegations against Bill Clinton:

While the Los Angeles Times laid out its investigation of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s alleged sexual harassment, the Times isn’t always interested in running last-minute exposes that have the potential to derail a political campaign. In 1999, the New York Times recalled allegations that Gov. Bill Clinton may have raped Juanita Broaddrick: “The allegation was passed on to reporters for the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times in the waning days of the 1992 presidential campaign. Regarding it as the kind of toxic waste traditionally dumped just before Election Day, both newspapers passed on the story.”

For more on that story see the February 24, 1999 CyberAlert.

For its part, the Times also dismissed the Broaddrick story in 1999 with a media navel-gazer by Josh Getlin and Elizabeth Jensen, with the subheadline "Whether a woman’s allegation of sexual assault by Clinton in 1978 is true is secondary to competitive pressure." In the story, Times national editor Scott Kraft sniffed Broaddrick can "almost certainly not be proved or disproved today."

For more on how outlets who leapt to cover Anita Hill’s unproven allegations vs. [how it cover] Juanita Broaddrick’s, see this MediaWatch article.

As for the networks’ receptivity to Los Angeles Times investigations of sexual impropriety, recall that in 1993, Times reporters William Rempel and Douglas Frantz reported on the allegations of Arkansas state troopers that then Gov. Bill Clinton used them to set up meetings with women. See how other media outlets shrunk from that investigation, as recounted in MRC’s MediaWatch newsletter.

I've know about the Hitler story for months. The story is at least six years old. It wasn't news and wasn't worthy of reporting -- even on a blog. And the reports in the press have been about as accurate as Joe McCarthy was when he was making charges about communists -- no, actually what has appeared on ABC news, in the LA Times, and elsewhere has been less accurate and less true than anything said by Joseph McCarthy. And they are been as well sourced and as well researched as a Joe McCarthy communism charge.

Most of the lies spread by the news establishment are cleared up by the NY Times -- in their third attempt to get the story right, after two terribly shoddy attempts. The press really does suck.

Good coverage of the botched Hitler coverage here.

NBC on Clinton vs. NBC on Schwarzenegger:

Tom Brokaw’s hypocrisy. Back in 1999 when his own colleague, Lisa Myers, landed an interview with Juanita Broaddrick, who accused President Clinton of raping her 20 years earlier (1978), Brokaw refused to report it on the NBC Nightly News. But on Thursday night, Brokaw jumped right on the Los Angeles Times story about Arnold Schwarzenegger’s inappropriate sexual advances, going back to 1975, three years before the Broaddrick claim, and which fell far short of rape.

In 1999 February of 1999 Bill Clinton was not facing an election, while Schwarzenegger is facing one less than a week away and that, you’d think, would make the media more reticent to bring up events from decades ago.

Back in February of 1999, Brokaw only allowed Broaddrick’s name onto his show as part of a brief plug for the Myers interview on Dateline and he could muster nothing stronger that referring to her “controversial accusations.” As recounted in the February 26 CyberAlert about the February 24 NBC Nightly News and Dateline:
“When Today landed an exclusive with Linda Tripp a couple of weeks ago, Tom Brokaw played an excerpt the night before. But in this case, despite another exclusive for NBC, this vague end of show plug Wednesday night from Brokaw represents the totality of NBC Nightly News time devoted to Broaddrick: 'Tonight on Dateline NBC Lisa Myers with an exclusive interview with the woman known as Jane Doe No. 5, Juanita Broaddrick. Her controversial accusations about President Clinton. Dateline tonight at 8, 7 Central.’”

Fast forward to Thursday night and Brokaw didn’t hesitate to jump on the charges against Schwarzenegger forwarded by another media outlet: “A graphic article on the front page of today's Los Angeles Times detailing the allegations of a half dozen women. They told the paper Republican candidate Arnold Schwarzenegger sexually groped and humiliated them in actions that supposedly took place over three decades.”

From Costa Mesa, Campbell Brown summarized the allegations: “Among the claims: That he groped their breasts, made lewd sexual suggestions and tried to remove one woman's bathing suit in an elevator.” Brown helpfully added how “a campaign aide to Democratic Governor Gray Davis called Schwarzenegger's actions a crime meriting charges.”

Brown concluded by giving credibility to another allegation she had no ability to verify: “The Schwarzenegger campaign had hoped the candidate's apology would out the issue to rest, but at Schwarzenegger's very next campaign event Democratic protesters showed up with a young women who made yet another claim that Schwarzenegger had harassed her too.”

Former NOW board director Tammy Bruce on Schwarzenegger, Clinton and the Democrats.

It's taboo. Don't compare Schwazenegger to the poweruful senior Senator of Massachusetts.

It seems he was this way when he got here ...

Another accuser was Dan Lurie, a prominent figure for decades in the sport of bodybuilding, who told The Associated Press on Friday that he watched in amazement as Schwarzenegger repeatedly groped waitresses at a snack bar at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York around 1969 or 1970. "I said, `Arnold, what are you doing?" Lurie, now 80, recalled from his home in New York. "He said, `I want sex, this is what I do in my country.'

Another one. This one says that Schwarzenegger put his hand on her hind end. She's working with the crazy lady to produce anti-Schwarzenegger ad spots.

Prepare for three more days of puking. Note that Davis condemns Schwarzenegger for behavior which seems like high school antics next to Clinton's sexual assualt of Juanita Broaddrick -- or, as reported by Jill Stewart, Davis's physical assualt of his own staffers. Of course, Davis has been campaigning with Clinton, and has used Clinton in his campaign advertising. It's got to be all about puke for Davis, because the man cannot have any principled objection to folks who have committed sexual outrages far more disturbing than any Schwarzenegger has been charged with. When it comes to sexually abusive behavior, evidently all that matters to Davis is the party label.

And yet more puking. Note Feinstein's classic smear of Schwarzenegger.

Another puke festival.

Shriver on her husbands character -- and "gutter journalism".

Arnold Schwarzenegger -- the world's most famous human biotechnology experiment -- and how this may help explain his unacceptably selfish and demeaning behavior.

Rookie Bear Flagger Patterico's Pontifications comes up with an exclusive -- the LA Times' Roy Rivenburg criticizes the paper, saying "I wish my paper had a pro-recall columnist or two to balance out the predictable Lopez/King/Morrison/Skelton blather," among other things. Check it out.

Another crude Schwarzenegger pick-up attempt from the 1970's makes news in the LA Times.

Gray Davis's lead campaign supporter has been credibly charged with sexual harassment and sexual assault. Rather than being anonymous, the women involved have gone public. Will Davis pull his campaign ads? Is the LA Times on the story?

The biggest industry in Los Angeles is the entertainment industry. The story the LA Times broke yesterday on Schwarzenegger was a story (for the most part) of sexual harassment on the job in the entertainment industry. Schwarzenegger is a major player in LA's biggest industry. And this industry is a central part of the Times' news beat. So if the Schwarzenegger harassment story was worth reporting today, it was worth reporting years ago -- when the story first came to light. Here you had a major story -- a story which no doubt goes beyond Mr. Schwarzenegger -- and the Times happily sat on its hands. Only when politics entered the equation did the Times motivate itself to act.

It's impossible to know just how big of a hit Arnold Schwarzenegger has taken. But it is clear already that the reputation of the LA Times has take a massive hit -- solidifying its reputation for biased and politicized news reporting. How stupid can the paper be? The most important thing a paper has to go on is credibility. But by shear stupidity of timing -- publishing "dirt" only five days away from an election -- the Times has managed to created the perception that it is not in the news business, it's in the business of producing "hits" on disfavored political cadidates -- i.e. it's in knee-cap busting business of Davis-style "puke" politics. Unbelievably dumb. Whether or not the perception reflects the truth -- as so many now believe.

Right on the Left Beach comes to similar conclusions.

UPDATE: Susan Estrich rips the LA Times:

What this story accomplishes is less an attack on Schwarzenegger than a smear on the press. It reaffirms everything that's wrong with the political process. Anonymous charges from years ago made in the closing days of a campaign undermine fair politics.

Facing these charges, a candidate has two choices. If he denies them, the story keeps building and overshadows everything else he does. Schwarzenegger's bold apology is a gamble to make the story go away. It may or may not work.

But here's my prediction, as a Californian: It's too late for the Los Angeles Times' charges to have much impact. People have made up their minds. This attack, coming as late as it does, from a newspaper that has been acting more like a cheerleader for Gray Davis than an objective source of information, will be dismissed by most people as more Davis-like dirty politics.

UPDATE: The editor of the Times defends his paper's behavior. Jill Stewart is not impressed, ""I think it was a planned hit by the L.A. Times .. You'd almost have to be working for the Democratic party to throw it out this late when you know Schwarzenegger would have no time to respond. It's staggering that the L.A. Times has done this."

UPDATE: The LA Times -- responding to pressure from PrestoPundit -- investigates the entertainment industry.

Tomorrow's Field poll today:

Schwarzenegger 36
Bustamante 26
McClintock 15

The NY Times -- following the lead of the LA Times -- runs with unverified rape threat charges against Schwarzenegger, made by a woman named Gail Escobar, who showed up at a Schwarzenegger rally with AFL-CIO operatives.

UPDATE: Bill Bradley has much more on Escobar and her Davis connections (unreported by the NY Times and the LA Times).

The Washington Times endorses Schwarzenegger.

Jill Stewart in the Press-Telegram this morning:

The only thing Davis or Bustamante can hope for is something with which to taint Schwarzenegger ...

Must have been written sometime before 9 p.m. last night ...

The Village Voice -- Orange County edition endorses McClintock.

"Do you read the Times?"

"No!"

Do you believe the Times?"

"No!"

"Do you trust the Times?"

"No!"

Shoutout by thousands at the Schwarzenegger event in Orange County, where the Times continues to retreat in its competition with the OC Register.

Hugh Hewitt on the LA Times. Quotable:

The Times' dogged support of Gray Davis has been remarkable, but not even Times critics expected so bald a descent into Mulholland-puppetry. Expect more to follow. Having gone this far past standard journalistic practice to prop up Davis, the paper has no reputation left to lose ..

More rich irony. The Bill Clinton sexual harassment apologist organization Moveon will attack Schwarzenegger -- on the issue of sexual harassment.

Calhusband on the LA Times:

The Los Angeles Times is making the news rather than reporting it. Throughout this campaign they have distorted their coverage in an effort to influence the result. This ranges from calling the recall "undemocratic", to referring to Arnold as "the actor", to the results of their biased polls, which have consistently shown the race tighter than every other pollster thought it was. A couple of weeks ago, they and Davis tried to spin that the race was tightening and that Davis had the momentum. It simply was not true. It was just what they hoped, and what they hoped to accomplish.

Jill Stewart and KFI's John and Ken were creaming the LA Times today for their politically motivated coverage of California politics. Stewart reminded KFI's huge audience that the Times has in the past spiked accounts of Gray Davis's physical and verbal abuse of his staff. Patterico's Pontifications has been blogging this story, and has an update with links. Stewart's original reporting on this matter can be found at Winds of Change.

UPDATE: Jill Stewart repeated her charges against Gray Davis and the LA Times on MSNBC. Mickey Kaus reports:

Jill Stewart was just on MSNBC's Abrams Report referring to her reports charging Gray Davis with "physically attacking his own staffers, female staffers." She says she was told the LA Times didn't follow up on her pieces because it didn't want to rely on anonymous sources!

Now it's ABC News recycling old news of Schwarzenegger in 1975 talking about Hitler. Only ABC seems not to know -- or not to care -- that this old news. This will simply add to the perception that we've entered the window of purely partisan "puke" politics -- with the press taking a lead roll in the pukefest.

Here it is. The LA Times unloads it's dirt on Schwarzenegger.

UPDATE: "I know that the people of California can see through this trash politics. Let me tell you something, let me tell you something. A lot of those that you see in the stories is not true, but at the same time, I have to tell you that I always say, that wherever there is smoke, there is fire. That is true. So I want to say to you, yes, that I have behaved badly sometimes. Yes, it is true that I was on rowdy movie sets and I have done things that were not right which I thought then was playful but now I recognize that I have offended people. And to those people that I have offended, I want to say to them I am deeply sorry about that and I apologize because this is not what I'm trying to do. When I'm governor, I want to prove to the women that I will be a champion for the women, a champion for the women. And I hope that you will give me the chance to prove that. Now let's go from the dirty politics back to the future of California." -- Arnold Schwarzenegger, this morning in San Diego.

UPDATE: California Insider gives some background on the LA Times reporters bringing us this story, and some commentary. Quotable:

The piece is credible, and disturbing. The disclosure of the incidents does not seem to have been orchestrated by an opponent’s campaign, although The Times does not describe in detail how it came upon the women other than to say they did not approach the newspaper on their own or through any of Schwarzenegger’s campaign rivals. Although none of the women involved ever filed a legal action against Schwarzenegger, the behavior described is abusive and crude ...

I think Schwarzenegger is helped as much as he is hurt by the timing. The campaign has prepared the world for the possibility of late chargtes of a personal nature. And he might be able to use the timing itself to try to fend off the allegations.

UPDATE: More from California Insider. Quotable: ".. he is trying to have it both ways by denying the specific allegations in The Times while apologizing for other behavior not linked to specific women or actions."

UPDATE: Der Schwarzengroper -- Kausfiles has an instant reaction.

UPDATE: Another instant reaction from LA Observed. Quotable:

I haven't read every Schwarzenegger investigation piece, so I don't know all that's come before, but my sense is this adds cases but isn't a huge revelation. Anyone who believes the probable next governor is without character issues hasn't been listening or doesn't care. Is the story's timing suspicious? Not to me. You work these kinds of stories as long as you can, trying to get everything there is to get and cross checking all you can. There's no urgency to rush into print at the risk of being wrong. The only timing consideration for me is to not run the story so late it hits unfairly, on the final weekend. In this case there is adequate time for the Schwarzenegger campaign to respond, if they wish. But I doubt they were surprised anyway. (Sean Walsh does give the blanket denial in the story.)

UPDATE: Xrlq weighs in. So does Fresh Potatoes. And here's boomshock. Also, Andrew Sullivan.

UPDATE: And Peter Robinson. Quotable:

Arnold has now apologized ... An acceptable statement in itself, but one that raises questions about Arnold's political judgement. Since he knew all along that he has behaved like a boor--and done so with such frequency that accounts of his behavior were bound to come out--why didn't he issue this apology weeks ago, addressing the issue early to get it out of the way? And if Arnold thought it best to try to hide the issue instead, what else might he still be trying to hide?

''When I am governor," Arnold continued, "I want to prove to the women that I will be a champion for the women, a champion of the women."

We can all guess what that means. Since he has behaved like a serial predator, Arnold will attempt to placate women by supporting the whole radical, feminist agenda.

What effect will this morning's charges have on the recall? I couldn't say. But as of yesterday, polls showed Arnold ahead of Bustamante by 10 to 15 percent. If Arnold's lead now evaporates, permitting Bustamante to claim the governor's mansion, no one will be able to blame McClintock. Arnold will have brought it on us himself.

UPDATE: Now Hugh Hewett:

Readers of the report on Arnold Schwarzenegger in this morning’s Los Angeles Times should ask themselves when did editorial standards change at the paper. In January 2001, the Los Angeles Times censored a George Will column because it contained a reference to Clinton victim Juanita Broadderick. I discovered the censorship during a broadcast and the public outcry over it forced the editors at the Times to admit error:

“George F. Will's column on Thursday's commentary page, as edited by the Times, omitted the author's statement that it is reasonable to believe that President Clinton 'was a rapist 15 years before becoming president.' Although some might dispute Will's interpretation of the facts, it is his opinion and should have been included in his column”.

Higher-ups in the newspaper had to reverse an earlier decision to delete the reference in the Will column and issued the explanation quoted above. Still, one has to wonder why the concern of the paper towards Clinton's reputation displayed in the original edit of the Will column, as well as in the handling of the TrooperGate story and its refusal to take seriously Kathleen Wiley’s allegations, has now sharply evolved into an aggressive stance on harassment allegations when they are leveled against a Republican. Bloggers with more time available to them than I may well be able to compare and contrast the Tammny Times’ treatment of all these stories, but only a fool would trust the Los Angles Times to accurately and fairly report the story of this sort on a day this close to an election.

Lincoln club contends that McClintock promised to drop out. Quotable:

The Lincoln Club in its letter [to McClintock] said that McClintock in a June 13 private meeting told its board of directors that he would not act as a spoiler and asked him to honor the pledge.

Socialist Worker Online -- "Why Peter Camejo deserves your vote."

The Washington Post on the Schwarzenegger run for governor.

Comic headline of the day:

Despite his best personal touch, his message just isn't sticking

Radio Free California -- John Fund's Political Diary. Quotable:

But talk radio didn't wait for the consultants to strategize; it gave the recall a life of its own. The flashpoint appears to have been a Jan. 20 interview with Shawn Steel, the outgoing chairman of the California Republican Party. Mr. Steel appeared on a morning talk show on San Francisco's KSFO hosted by Lee Rodgers and Melanie Morgan. Ms. Morgan pointed out how estimates of the state's budget deficit had nearly tripled since the election and asked him, "What can we do about Davis?" Mr. Steel paused for a moment and said "What about a recall?" The phone lines suddenly lit up, and Mr. Steel and Ms. Morgan had a movement behind them. Mr. Steel and others call Ms. Morgan "the mother of the recall."

Within days two statewide recall drives were launched ...

Gallop's California recall poll analysis.

MSNBC profile -- candidate Schwarzenegger captivates the voting public. Quotable:

Even before Schwarzenegger announced his candidacy, his advisers spent weeks during the summer meeting with focus groups of voters of all political persuasions to gauge their feelings for Davis and to see if the actor had political credibility. What they say they found was an across-the-board disdain for the governor — and an opportunity for the actor. “The anger was palpable,” one Schwarzenegger adviser said. “Even Democrats thought Davis was wishy-washy, and when he acted it was only in his self-interest. What they wanted far more than anything was leadership. There would be some laughing and giggling at first about Arnold becoming a candidate, but it wasn’t really a hard sell. It seemed like he could be a perfect contrast to Davis, in a climate when voters wanted change.”

Schwarzenegger has a 10-point plan for his first 100 days as governor. California Insider thinks Schwarzenegger will get much of what he wants:

“We are ready to take office,” [Schwarzenegger] said. “We are ready to act.”

But can he succeed? I think he can. Just as Schwarzenegger has rewritten the rules of political campaigning, if he wins, he will be able to re-write the rules of governing. He would do this because he would have an ability that the Legislature does not have and that most governors before him have not been able to master: the ability to communicate directly with the people of California ...

But I think the dominant theme of a Schwarzenegger Administration would be follow-through. Consider the seemingly small matter of education finance reform. Everyone in Sacramento knows that the special programs that riddle the education budget are a joke, decades of pet projects built upon special deals on top of obsolete ideas. The Sacramento Bee published an amazing series earlier this year documenting all of this. Davis promised to overhaul it. But when he ran into opposition, which was inevitable, he caved. Somehow I think Schwarzenegger would follow through where Davis backed down. It’s just a gut feeling I have. Maybe I’m completely wrong. But I think I’m right.

More than anything I think it's this sense that Schwarzenegger will a force to be reckoned with in Sacramento which has brought him so much support, particularly among Republicans who want to see something or someone who can protect their pockets from the theives who populate the capital. This sense of force comes from many places -- the power of personal charisma, a track record of winning, raw celebrity, a highly positive attitude, great independent wealth, etc. and it is this sense of shear force and power that is captivating to voters -- both as political theater and as political promise. Schwarzenegger has the "I paid for this microphone" sense about him that signals to people that he's going to get things done. And he has resources of personality, celebrity, charm, etc. that will bring power to the table in Sacramento -- through fundraising ability, through raw persuasion, and through a fame-spawned personal link to the people that is close to unprecedented in statewide politics.

People sense that all this will make a difference -- and lets hope it will, because the problems of the state are very real.

Thanks to Roy Rivenburg, whose "RECALL MADNESS" column has give us top coverage of the debate and other unmatch recall reportage.

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